The Novel, Who Needs It?

In this crotchety tirade, Epstein (Gossip), former editor of The American Scholar, rambles about the state of literature and the merits of the novel. The form “provides truths of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else,” according to Epstein, because, among other virtues, novels offer opportunities to “test” the plausibility of ideas, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky does in The Brothers Karamazov when he depicts the ruinous consequences of accepting the “atheist notions that ‘all is permitted.’ ” Unfortunately, Epstein frequently digresses to offer tired takes on political correctness and the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art. His argument that “one can in fact account for good taste,” and that it develops from “listening to lots of elevated music” (Bach, Beethoven) and “viewing... the best paintings and sculptures” (the works of Renaissance artists), fails to acknowledge that deciding what counts as “the best” begs the very question he’s trying to answer. Elsewhere he bemoans the “ethnic and gender strait-jacketing of political correctness” and makes the overwrought claim that the idea of cultural appropriation threatens to “put an end to all fiction.” Sweeping unsupported generalizations (“Great literature is about the role of destiny and moral conflict”) and a baffling section praising the author’s own depictions of sex in his fiction further drag this down. Irascible and meandering, this has little to offer. (July)