The battery won't run out, and there's no need to wonder if you can find a wi-fi signal.
I’m not done with the novel. I’m referring to the literary form overall, not any one in particular that I’m reading, or even any particular one that I’m writing. (Publishers? Are you listening? I’m easy to reach!)
In a society that’s abandoned serious reading faster than it gave up catalytic converters, I feel it’s vital to speak up for this venerated, vital way for conveying stories.
A novel is not interactive. Once undertaken by a reader, there’s no deviation from the author’s path. It’s on railroad tracks. It has no links for sharing while you’re in the middle of it, with the exception of you picking up your phone and calling your sister to tell her about it. There’s no metadata you can access beyond your own life experiences and how the words of the story may provoke you to initiate a discussion with others.
Someone will inevitably point out that with a wide variety of electronic reading devices, including the one on which you’re likely reading this very article, there are ways you might annotate, share, or otherwise interact with a novel. All sorts of newfangled experiments with interaction have started to emerge, from purely experimental stunts to more button-downed efforts to continue a dialogue with readers through modern serialization. These efforts to drag the novel as a written format into the mid-21st century may be new but miss the point. As befitting its traditional, pre-industrial genesis, a novel is a series of words strung end to end in a way that tells a linear story, and presumably a story that its author wants to convey.
Some novels are more serious than others, more meaningful or frivolous than others, better written than others. Some are completely disposable, perfect for an airplane ride with hardly a second glance once consumed. As a cultural format for exchanging ideas, however, the novel offers something that most other formats simply can’t replicate. It offers intimacy and detail in a singular, private package. It delivers thoughts rather than direct sensation, and does so in a way that demands we privately conjure all of the many sensory bits necessary for the story to come to life.
The era of serialized, episodic television looks like a contemporary version of the novel, with sprawling stories and extraordinary complexities and the ability to provoke broader cultural dialogue. Some are pretty fabulous, in fact, and the cultural chatter around the best of them can be loquacious. But television presents sights and sounds imagined by someone else. Serialized television ultimately spoon feeds an audience, no matter how tasty, or even satisfying, those morsels may be.
Novels are different. They demand you get involved. You can’t be doing something else when you’re reading a novel. You must do your own imagining. You also can’t check out periodically while you’re in the process of reading a novel. The moment you do, you’re not reading!
Elitist implications are already stalking the edges of the essay here. There’s a risk you’ll perceive it as some sort of qualitatively hierarchical selection of one media format over another. That would be a mistake. Just as there’s no “superior” musical style, there’s no style of storytelling that’s fundamentally better than another. At issue here is that the networked, ubiquitously hyperlinked world can overwhelm any format — like novels — that present ideas at a non-networked pace. If that were to become the new lingua franca, that would be a shame. The great cultural power of novels comes largely because they facilitate persistence of memory, both for individual readers as well as for wider populations of readers. That persistence enables depth of consideration, sometimes purely for entertainment, but often for ideas and experiences that we might otherwise never consider. I suspect the vital characters and events unspooled by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, or Margaret Atwood would not have had the lasting cultural impact if they appeared in hundreds of sequential tweets or thirteen HBO episodes.
Novels demand us to be quiet, at least for a little while. They demand us to turn inward and soak in the intangible shimmer of ideas. In a world of endless stimulation, that narrative focus is a valuable alternative and tonic. It is the preservation of thinking thoughts beyond messages exchanged at traffic lights.
Plus, you can’t beat the fact that the paper versions of these things work just fine without any worry about the batteries running down.