Understanding each other

Jane Smiley

The death of the novel, if that is what is happening, may be more serious than we thought. Jane Smiley certainly thinks so in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, and her book was published in 2005. Things have not improved in the past two decades.

Novels have been around for only a few hundred years, just as widespread literacy has been common for only a few hundred years. Certainly human life has changed during this time, mostly for the better. Might the novel have had something to do with this? Smiley thinks so. Novels take us into the lives of other people, often people very different from ourselves. We occupy, however briefly, the minds of these people. Novels help us to better understand one another. If fewer people read novels, perhaps much of this understanding and empathy will be lost.

"If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies," Smiley writes.

"If the novel has died for men (and some publishers and critics say that men read fewer novels that they used to), then the inner lives of their friends and family members are a degree more closed to them than before," she writes.

And this affects women, too, for most of the novels they read are written by other women, thus depriving them of the male point of view.

"If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well."

Do we really want to go back to a time before vast numbers of people — men and women, rich and poor, old and young — began reading Defoe, Dickens, Austen, Scott, Twain, Stowe and all the others and thus began to better understand each other?