“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.”
“Philip has been talking like this for decades now and the fact is, he keeps writing books and people keep reading them. And I just, I disagree strenuously. Human beings need stories and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places, whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories. Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.
Okay. Perhaps, you know, the market, the way things are moving, fewer people are reading novels than previously. But still, if you walk into a bookstore, there are thousands upon thousands of them there. And they wouldn’t be in print unless somebody was buying them. Libraries are crammed with novels as well, and people are reading them. And I don’t think it’s ever going to dry up because two, the novel is such a flexible form. It’s not like a sonnet, it’s not fixed. You can do anything you want with it. It’s just a story that you tell within the covers of the book. But all bets are off, there are no rules. And that’s why I think the novel is constantly reinventing itself. And society continues to reinvent itself. Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it. So much as I admire Philip Roth, I just think he’s wrong about this.”
First posted: Friday, September 3rd, 2010.
