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Is Fiction Necessary?

I know I’m late getting to this, but T’is the season, and things are hectic at my house.

I want to chime in about the December 7 article by Edward Wyatt in The New York Times that appeared under the headline: Publishers Assess the Fall Season’s Winners and Losers.

T’was as bleak as all the analyses we’re growing accustomed to these days. But one quote in the article strikes me as particularly dangerous — because it can so easily become self-fulfilling.

With an aside on plain-spokenness, the article quotes Simon and Schuster publisher David Rosenthal thusly: “If there’s any theme to the year, it’s that people only want to read the truth.”

Michael Cader has already pointed out that such a perspective may well arise naturally from the S&S publishing program, given that it’s pretty easy to name a number of 2005 novels that outpaced the best selling nonfiction titles of the year.

But more important, if we couple Rosenthal’s take on the mood of the Book Nation with the Industry’s widespread perception that there was no dynamite fiction in 2005, then it begins to appear as though the Island is still lost and despaired.

It’s as though the Island were asserting that fiction has had its day.

(I’ll refrain from treating here the eternal return of The End of the Novel. That’s too easy.)

I suppose I should count it a hopeful sign that Celina Spiegel and Julie Grau were lured to Doubleday to start a new quality fiction imprint there. (The description of their mandate does sound quite a bit like what we were working on at BlueHen.) But their move to Doubleday might also indicate that the climate for the wonderful works they handle might still be as stifling at Putnam as when we were there, right after September 11.

(September 11 is a shadow in all of these thoughts, you know, but I’ll not treat that here either.)

More to the point: When so successful and gifted a novelist as Jane Smiley feels it necessary produce her own course of literary study — Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf) — just to convince herself that fiction still matters, then we have a problem. And by “we” I don’t mean only Unbridled Books and the other presses and imprints who are fully devoted to releasing good works of fiction. By “we” I mean the readerly culture.

And so, I want to make an assertion and to ask a question (or two).

The Assertion:

It seems clear to me that there’s an essential role for fiction now, when who we are is such an important consideration.

The Questions:

1. Regardless of what the sales might be these days of novels over against nonfiction, or of commercial fiction against the quiet works that become staff picks at your local independent bookstore, is fiction done for the time being (as we were told irony would be)?

Say no.

2. When Mr. Rosenthal asserts that people want to read what is true, he’s asserting the “untruth” of novels and stories and, perhaps, poems. To an old literary fellow like me, that assertion seems easily answerable. Don’t we still need the kind of truth that good fiction brings to us?

(See The Assertion and then say yes.)

Fred Ramey

 
 

Comment

  1. Lets not forget the “hidden” truths in fiction…universal experiences and emotions…and new premises…dressed in fictional settings. Cheers this Holiday and all year.

    — Marty · 12/14/05 02:56 PM · #

  2. Humanity always seems to want to “bemoan” something…whether to make news, or give voice to that interior depression/pessimism that seems to plague many (and why is that?). The world is what WE make of it, period, and if people are afraid because they no longer feel safe (note: I didn’t say they WEREN’T safe), because bullies came over to their house, versus the playground, they need to deal with that. It’s never all or nothing in anything. It’s the PERCEPTION that something is all or nothing that I find fascinating. We all need to ask ourselves why is this—and answers to questions like this will pervade our entire existence, not just the publishing, film, or any other limited instance of any similarly derived question. With fiction, we can give our points of view to get people to think about why things may or may not be, rather than just let events sit and be manipulated by a media looking for ratings, or playing upon fears. Fiction is a chance to express our love and view of the world, to help make sense of our struggles and to show, yes, you are not the only person experiencing this pain, this joy, this thought. It is also meant…to entertain. To be too serious it so miss a very important aspect of life. To be a big more prosaic: use it or lose it.

    — F. P. Dorchak · 12/16/05 08:05 AM · #

  3. Thank you for all you do, and for saying this. Some of us, meanwhile, just keep writing the best novels we can.

    — Katharine Weber · 12/20/05 09:02 AM · #

  4. Mr. Ramey,
    Fiction tells the truth from an imaginary point of view. In TLS books of the year, I’ve found several books that create an new ‘truth.’ Such as “The Seducer” by a Danish novelist published twenty years ago that I read a year ago and still haunts memory. No, he doesn’t seduce anyone, but is seduced rather often. Another this year, recommended by Ali Smith is “The Door” by Magda Szabo. “Dr. and Mrs. Browne” in the same vein.
    Richard Smith

    — Richard D. Smith · 12/20/05 10:52 PM · #

  5. I should add that I am 74 and a practicing physician for 49 and still at it every day.
    RDS

    — Richard D. Smith · 12/20/05 11:00 PM · #

  6. I’d bet a hardback that many, many of those “truth” books are bought in the heat of fashion and left unread. People love fiction. Absolutely love it. We just have to encourage more to take a breather with a book and not rely on the pretty pictures on the big and small screen.

    — jason evans · 01/03/06 12:47 PM · #

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