Do Novels Make Us Better People?

A riff on the value of fiction

Photo by Yuri Efremov on Unsplash

I’ve kind of accepted that books don’t matter.

That’s misleading.

Individual books can still matter. I just don’t think books matter as a whole.

It feels like the last gasps of the opera.

Opera still exists, just not at the same level it once did.

Or boxing. Or horse racing.

These were fundamental American “pastimes” and they fell apart.

But maybe novels are more important than we think.

Especially as we fall apart with isolation.

Deeper stories may actually help us with that.

I’ve saved this quote from an article from the author Garth Hallberg.

It’s about combatting loneliness with books. Take a look:

There’s also something new that Hallberg wants to do with City on Fire. In 2012, he wrote an essay for the Times Magazine on the Franzen-Eugenides-Wallace cohort headlined “Why Write Novels at All?” He read into their generation a desire to make readers feel less lonely by showing them other lonely people. Hallberg wanted to turn that notion on its head. “Think about it,” he wrote. “I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I…