Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don’t read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right.
There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets.
Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year?
But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won’t help.
Let’s start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children’s writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 “we’re going through a bit of a golden age for children’s fiction.” He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson.