The Novel Will Never Die

I don’t know whether the “experts” foretelling the demise of the book sincerely believe what they’re saying, or merely enjoy the notoriety that comes from making bold and gloomy forecasts. What gets me is that they’re not just talking about the supplanting of the 400-year-old printed codex with eBooks on Kindles, iPads, Nooks, etc. (which the pundits say is merely the sort of bastardized first step that comes with any new watershed medium, as Saint Marshall of McLuhan preached). No, these seers are predicting that the traditional book – and even its acme, the novel – will disappear altogether, and be replaced by some sort of shared interactive multimedia game-like experience.

This debate has proven to be a good Rorschach Test for me personally, and after much self-analysis, I’ve come to believe the novel will, in fact, survive. This bias is not, by the way, because I’m some sort of digital Luddite. Quite the contrary. In addition to being a writer, I am a producer of interactive digital content. Over the past two decades I have shrugged off the transformation of other media, and have happily embraced and exploited the convenience and flexibility that their digital incarnations offered. But when it comes to novels I have a very different reaction. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I also write novels, and so am clearly biased. But long before I became a writer of stories I was a reader of stories, and it is from there that my fierce loyalty originates. There is simply nothing like a good book.

One of the important factors here is the underlying artistic nature of a medium. For example, progressing from LPs to MP3s hasn’t changed the crux of the listening experience for music. If I close my eyes and wallow in Beethoven or Hendrix, I’m still absorbing exactly what the artist wanted me to. Admittedly, the entire value chain and distribution mechanism between me and the composer has changed irrevocably, but it’s not the bits or wireless network that matter, but rather the music that feeds the sensory experience.

Computer games are admittedly a new and wildly popular art form, but just as live theatre (or novels, for that matter) didn’t disappear because of movies and television, so I don’t accept that the novel will be supplanted by some sort of interactive gaming experience or social collaboration. First of all, there’s more to a novel than the plot. It’s not just what is written, it’s how it’s written. The limitless flexibility of the language, and the author’s ability to manipulate the mind and the emotions of the reader, are unparalleled. The very fact that everything is not spoon fed to readers, and they must use their own imaginations, is the strength, not the weakness, of the novel.

Nor do I believe future readers will want to forgo all private experience in order to share every word with their Facebook friends, or that they will only want to partake of stories that they create or control themselves. We all have limits to our experience and inventiveness, and certainly, in my own case, I enjoy being turned over into the hands of a master storyteller to experience new eye-opening possibilities that I would never have conceived of.

There’s also the simple economy of writing a novel, which can be done by one individual (the editors, publishers, printers, and publicists required to then bring it to market notwithstanding).The idea that the novel’s successor will also require a phalanx of programmers, animators, designers, and actors to bring it to fruition seems, by definition, to be an intrinsic limitation. Still, unlike many of the aforementioned pundits, I’m willing to admit I have no special wisdom or a psychic ability to prognosticate. Fortunately, I have already amassed more books than I will be able to read in my lifetime and, for the foreseeable future anyway, more are on their way, so even if I’m wrong, I’ll at least be content.