The great river

A novelist is someone who has volunteered to be a representative of literature and to move it forward a generation. That is all.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley's comment above begins to make sense after reading her earlier comment describing literature as "the great river of novels." Her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, represents Smiley's view of literature, from the earliest novels to some written not long before her book was published in 2005. She examines the whole river, so to speak.

In her view, anyone who writes a novel, good or bad, acts something like a small tributary. And so her metaphor comes clear. A novelist volunteers — nobody is forced — to write a novel, and by doing so adds to that great river and, as she says, helps "move it forward a generation." Even those who write novels set in an earlier generation are, perhaps without even meaning to, saying something about their own generation.

Even as fewer people seem to be reading novels, more people seem to be writing them. Years ago I made this observation about poetry — that more people seemed to write poems than read them. Now something similar seems to be happening with novels. There may be more novels being published today than ever before. Whether or not that is true, this great river keeps getting bigger and bigger, while fewer of us seem to be stopping to take a dip in that river.