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« American Scholar correction | Main | Zadie Smith on fiction » Wednesday, January 17, 2007Whither fiction?In Sunday's Times of London, under the Comment heading, there appeared a piece by Rod Liddle that combined "Why is it that..." observation with a kind of jeremiad against contemporary fiction. This is an issue I've thought about a lot since I worked at two magazines that take books and novels seriously (The New Leader and The New York Review of Books). It has become commonplace to talk about the decline of fiction not as a skill (though Liddle throws that in) but as an increasingly irrelevant from of communication, particularly since Sep. 11. It's hard to know, as far as my personal experience goes, whether I was reacting to this line of argument or simply coming to the same conclusion when I worked at these magazines, but it seemed so much less vital to engage with the hot new novelists. (I'm aware this is something of a risky confession.) Are novels still bringing "the news that stays news," in Ezra Pound's phrasing? Of course. An entire generation hasn't forgotten how to write. But it seems we're still coming to grips with how to handle, in art, the confusion that assails us in the new world of threats real and imagined. Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:17 PM
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