The End of the Novel

There was a time, once, when a novelist’s examination of, and rumination over, the mind of her subject made some sense, but no longer. Tolstoy devoted hundreds of pages to the slow, painful, psychological demise of Anna Karenina, for example, as did Dostoevsky toward Raskolnikov. I am now thinking of Theodor Dreiser’s account of the slow descent ofHurstwood in Sister Carrie.
The point is not that the writer’s trade has diminished or that style has gone awry; it is a crisis of a poverty of subject. That is to say, a media-addled, morally indifferent subject simply isn’t worthy of anyone’s time—on the writing or reading end of things. There is simply no depth to the recent personality—why would there be? Gameboy and immediate gratification? The novel is the improper form for such an audience. The novelist should meet them on their own terms—the 140-character (as it currently stands) snippet of comment. The nuanced commentary is decaying fruit.
I was once a research librarian at a major university. In 1999, I found myself aghast at the indifference of graduate students to the possibilities that lay within the stacks. Whenever I fielded a question from a graduate student and pointed them to the dark, mystery-ridden floors of stacks of books that loomed behind me, “Nah,” they would reply, “Way back there? Anything on the web?” With that, we would make our way, the grad student waddling some distance behind me, toward the bank of computers that lined the walls of the coffee shop/library. I can only imagine what the students are like today.
People seeking the quick out, the immediate solution, are not worth study. Why would anyone write about them?