What is the social function of the novel? I’m not thinking about the pay-off for the author, who gets to develop a skill and earn a living from it and accrue a prestigious public image into the bargain. Nor about the rewards for the publisher, who may, or more likely may not, make a significant amount of money. Nor even the pleasure for the individual reader, who enjoys hours of entertainment and maybe feels enlightened or usefully provoked along the way. What I’m asking is, what’s in it for society as a whole, or at least for that part of society that reads novels?
Conversation. A shared subject of discussion. Something complex for minds to meet around. This is particularly the case when we’re talking to people we don’t know well, people we meet, as it were, socially. Of course there are plenty of other topics available. The weather. Sports. Politics. But there’s only so much that can be said about cloud formations, not everyone sees the fascinations of baseball, and politics, as we know, can be dangerous territory. Novels—or films or television dramas for that matter—offer a feast of debate and create points of contact: are the characters believable, do people really do or think these things, does the story end as it should, is it well written? The way different people respond to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, or J.M. Coetzee’sDisgrace, will tell you a lot about their personalities without anything personal needing to be said. Novels are ideal subjects for testing the ground between us..................
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