In the United States, the UK and Australia, over the past decade the number of people buying and reading literary fiction has fallen precipitously. At the same time, sales figures for nonfiction books devoted to self-help (from the 'How to Kick the Sugar Habit' variety to the '12 Rules for … [whatever]' genre) and current affairs, or memoir and true crime, remain persistently strong.
In another time, this might be taken to be an indication that people don’t have the time or the interest in 'frivolous' fiction, and that they are correspondingly serious about learning more about the world, or modern politics, or other cultures, or whatever. But in our time, there is every reason to suspect that this trend reflects a more transactional or utilitarian relationship with the books we choose: we buy and read books that give us what we already expect, or what fill a need we already know, or that we can mine for precisely what we want.
What is missing here is the serendipity that reading a probing, expansive, surprising novel affords, or the opportunities for deep empathy and uncomfortable self-critical awareness it provides, or the personal transformation that the time it takes to read a demanding, exacting novel occasions. This raises an inescapable question for us: Is there something essential for the moral life that is communicated by — and only by — literary fiction?
Books mentioned on the program:
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Flannery O’Conner, All the Rises Must Converge
Flannery O’Conner, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
RJ Palacio, Wonder
Michelle de Kretser, The Life To Come
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains
Howard Jacobson, Pussy: A Novel
Helen Garner, The First Stone
Helen Garner, Joe Cinque's Consolation
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello