Fact from Fiction

The Dying Art of the Novel, by Geoff Ryan*

T

here are probably more novels being published annually than ever before. Computers have revolutionized the publishing industry, allowing independent presses to spring up and investing erstwhile vanity press publications with a respectability belying their origins. Today everyone and anyone can be a writer and the hottest ticket is fiction. We have more choice than ever, in every conceivable genre from historical to sci-fi, crime and mystery to action, romance and comedy. A reader’s paradise, one would think. Yet it is difficult finding a good novel to read these days.

At the heart of this never-ending tide of narratives there is a hollow core. Each time I peruse the fiction shelves at the local large-chain bookstore, scanning the titles and reading the dust jackets, I inevitably leave with a feeling of dissatisfaction, somewhat akin to leaving a restaurant hungry. The books seem…lacking, somehow. The characters lack depth beyond themselves, the plots lack meaning beyond the present, language is nuanced only when employing irony, evil is relentlessly celebrated, beauty is always sexualized.

The short answer for why this is the case, is that religion, faith and God are no longer in the mix. Novels are now deeply and truly secular. The term secular is derived from the Latin saeculum which means a race, generation, age, the times, or the world. In the words of James Hitchcock, “to call someone a secularist means that he or he is completely time bound, totally a child of his age, a creature of history, with no vision of eternity.” Such is our culture, such are our novelists and our novels these days.

Graham Greene, the brilliant novelist and wayward Catholic, contended that after the seventeenth century the novel had degenerated because of a lack of religious seriousness. When orthodox religious belief made a reappearance in the nineteenth century, then fullness and depth of the human soul were again available to writers. Despite their vagaries about religion, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Lawrence, and James had all benefited from it. By contrast, Greene argued, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster’s characters: “Wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.”

William Faulkner, in his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, said: “…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about… he writes not of love, but of lust, of defeat in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones leaving no scars.”

Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity of a priest of God. George Orwell believed the writer’s calling was to tackle injustice. James Lee Burke, writing in the New York Times said: “I believe creativity is a votive gift, presented arbitrarily by the hand of God, and those who possess it are simply its vessel.” Even Jack Kerouac gave credit where it is due: “Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul.”

The very best writers and the most excellent novels include faith. The novelists themselves need not be paragons of virtue or the most upstanding examples of Christian rectitude (Greene’s personal papers include a list of his 47 favourite prostitutes, Kerouac drank himself to death, Orwell despised organized religion, Hemingway blew his head off…) but if God is altogether absent than I would question the veracity of any novel in chronicling or illuminating the human experience. However much it may reflect reality as it is lived in our culture today it is still a sad fantasy. In his essay, “The Dark Night of The Novel in an Age of Weak Faith”, David McLaurin concludes that “At the heart of the modern novel is this sense that each one must work out his or her destiny in a world bereft of moral signposts…gone are the schematic choices of the past.” McLaurin suggests Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Vile Bodies (1930), as a paradigm for the emptiness and moral void in today’s offerings.

At the other end of the spectrum, walking into a Christian bookstore a few years ago, even if there were a fiction section, it would have been at most a small afterthought. That has changed over the past 15 years. Christian novels are churned out at an astounding rate, easily outselling the more traditional fare of devotional books, Bible resources, inspirational how-tos and self-helps. I do not think the majority of these novels cannot qualify as either literature or art.

A most recent glaring example is the Left Behind series of fictionalized, pre-millennial novels. Politically loaded theology, grade-eight reading level, stereotypes instead of characters, “cardboard symbols wandering through a paper-thin world”, in fact. Yet Christians read them. In fact, if the New York Times bestseller list (fiction) included religious books (which it doesn’t) the Left Behind series would have outsold any other novels ever written. They are novels ostensibly full of God, yet for all that, as flat and dissatisfying as their secular counterparts. Same results, different reasons.

For those of us caught between the lightweight, vapidity of recent secular novels and the lightweight vapidity of recent Christian novels is there any help around, short of returning wholesale to the classic novels of the past?

Co-Founder and Co-Editor of theRubicon and Co-Ordinator of the 614 Network (http://www.614network.com/), Geoff and his wife Sandra minister to Regent Park, a social housing project in Downtown Toronto.

*First published in ChristianWeek magazine

3 Comments to Fact from Fiction

1. Good stuff Geiff. I feel the same disappointment in bookstores and libraries. There are a few authors I can read, and other than that I hav to stear clear. Anything popular is almost invariably unreadable, for some reason.

   Is there a place here for readers to make recommendations of novels that have depth and story and character?

   Grace,

   Aaron
aaron on October 29th, 2006

2. Aaron:

   It’s all all about time–few of us have time to waste these days, especially on getting ahold of a book only to find it’s a waste of time!

   So yes, Aaron, there definitely is a place here at theRubicon for recommendations of novels that have depth and story and character AND can be shown to be relevant to Christian ministry (broadly speaking) in the form of book reviews. We’d welcome reviews of multiple books and/or book series.

   Please forward reviews (with complete bibliographic citations, your photo and bio) to the Submissions and Founding Editor Geoff Ryan at talkback@therubicon.org.

   Peace,

   Andrea Demchuk
   (Posting Editor)
Andrea614Regent on October 29th, 2006

3. I am a third career theologian. 3 is such a great theological number. One of my interests is using literature to teach theology to college age students. It is good to know you are out there as I once attended the U of Guelph. In a long ago age…
Susan on November 25th, 2006

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