The Novel, Who Needs It?
By Joseph Epstein
Encounter Books 2023

It’s not given to many authors to produce masterpieces while heading into their nineties. By that age, they’re usually slipping slightly fuzzy trifles out into an indulgent world that handles those trifles with kid gloves out of respect for a long literary career now largely agreed to be over. The appearance of such trifles is taken as a starter’s pistol to let loose think-pieces on the whole career, and the trifles themselves are typically described under the all-forgiving euphemism “late style.” 

It’s both diplomatic and sad, and it’s unavoidable to think of such things when taking up this slim 100-page new bagatelle by prolific critic and editor Joseph Epstein, who’s in his late eighties and here mainly ruminates lightly on the nature of fiction, with plenty of personal anecdotes and asides. As an echo of some of Epstein’s bigger and more vigorous books, things like Life Sentences or his brilliant Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life, this latest, The Novel, Who Needs It? (Epstein says the answer is “we all do,” and in reality the answer is “nobody”) will provide an hour of entertaining reading and plenty of gentle smiles. 

The old cliche very much applies to Epstein, although it’s likewise a bit melancholy: he’s forgotten more about books and reading than most people will ever know. The various brief sections are filled with genial literary references tossed off with casual erudition, whether it’s a mention of Theodore Dreiser’s daring as an author or the merits of Lord David Cecil’s wonderful but now-forgotten book The Fine Art of Reading. As conversation, The Novel, Who Needs It would sparkle.

As a book, unfortunately, it’s inevitably got more padding than a hockey goalie. “Novelists tell stories, set scenes, describe actions, provide dialogue, organize plots,” readers are told at one point. “Some novelists do one or another of these things extremely well; others do some of them better than others. A rare few do them all excellently.” What we hope from a novel, we read at another point, “is that, somehow, reading will broaden our experience, sharpen our perceptions, make us a bit wiser about the world.” Novels are ultimately about ideas, we learn (once our author has obligingly narrowed down what counts as a genuine worthwhile novel to a few dozen improving titles he particularly likes), “but ideas played out in the lives of their characters.”

Not exactly scintillating stuff, and precious little consolation to have quite so many rubrics laid out in quite so few pages, even by a living legend. Even thinner consolation when the book periodically hints at more interesting fare it will never get around to serving. Epstein very briefly reflects on his time at Commentary, dishing deliciously intelligent dissections of writers like Robert Stone, John Irving, Joan Didion, John Updike, and Philip Roth, describing the infectious zeal he and his fellow critics felt during those years. “The critic, in this environment,” he writes, “was a gatekeeper of high art, working to make sure that no one unqualified was allowed into the holy pantheon.”

In the 21st century, “gatekeeper” has become a term of derision, an accusation of snobbery. Maybe it always has been, and maybe it was never really the book critic’s job. Certainly for every hopeful literary giant Epstein managed to slay, three others have entered the pantheon despite his best efforts. But in any case, a fuller account of these quixotic battles would have made more interesting reading than learning that novelists tell stories. 

For that fuller account, readers will have to go to scattered sections of earlier books, the oddly patchwork publication history of one of the great literary lives of the last half-century. The Novel, Who Needs It acts as an elegant little digestif to that sprawling banquet.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.