An Italian journalist asked my thoughts on all the attention being given to Jonathan Franzen, since Franzen's status is being considered in light of Dickens and I've given some thought to Dickens. The comparison, or any comparison of that type, seems pretty dull to me and to have little to do with the experience of being a reader or writer. So I have some thoughts, more broadly about novel writing, and thought I'd share them.

I think the novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below in its prestige behind poetry, essay and history. Anxiety about proving the novel's seriousness has never really left us. "Modernist" novelists of the first half of the twentieth century were kamikaze, creatively speaking, counting on experiments to overthrow the novel itself. We still subconsciously try to prove, as writers and readers, that the novel is "real" enough to merit attention--perhaps part of the appeal of historical fiction.

While today we tend to think of the book in terms of its lack of technology, the mass production of the novel became feasible only because of cutting edge technological, industrial and business practices particularly advanced in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines--by turns, embracing and defying it. We can think of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway tossed around by Hollywood in different ways. I think in the last few years, however, there has been a big change in Hollywood, which has been gearing most films for twelve year olds. Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to international markets. Interestingly, this creates the opportunity for the novel to define itself in contrast to film by shifting back toward a nineteenth century voice and style of narrative. Dickens had little interest in experimentation, at least in any sense we would use the term today related to “literary” experiments. He was a storyteller first and foremost--in his novels, in speeches, in theater--and understood how importantly story guided the public imagination.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way. Some readers already sample the first chapter of a novel on their mobile phone screens.

Never before have there been so many novelists trained in various academic ways of thinking about the novel, and, especially in the United States, boasting academic degrees in fiction writing. What effect does this have?

There is a war of words between so-called literary and so-called commercial (or popular, or genre) writers. Personally, the categories do nothing for me. It's notable that the attention to Jonathan Franzen (and his new novel, but more to him as an entity) has prompted much of this tussle. Does he spend his life sitting around grateful for all the controversy he unintentionally provokes? (It almost seems like something that would happen repeatedly to a character in a novel.) I don't have too much to say that is particularly insightful about the arguments—Tess Gerritsen, Laura Lippman, David Liss and Jennifer Vanderbes have interesting asides (more interesting than many of the voices at the center, I think).* Recall that what made Franzen such a known figure among the public: not receiving the blessing of Oprah but (supposedly) spurning it. Unwittingly, Franzen's act became an almost allegorical recreation of the liberation of the novelist from the system of elite patrons that had controlled writers' destinies for centuries—with Oprah cast in the role of the elite. Haven't we always looked for the novelist as rogue against the establishment? Because we see the novelist as someone "like us"?

Filmmaking has always been a “popular” medium—that is, it is supported and shaped by the purchasing power of the public at large buying tickets, whether for fifty cents in 1950 or twelve dollars in modern-day New York city. Fine art, by contrast, remains laregly a patron-supported medium, since there are such a finite number of people who can and will support artists by paying ten or hundreds of thousands of dollars for paintings, sculptures and so on. What about poets? Poets still for the most part rely on grants and academic positions for funding. Writing has taken both forms, and at certain times and places in history depended mostly on the patronage system. Not storytelling, mind you. That had been an oral tradition and usually had no authorial figure or patron attached. There is a vagueness about the way we perceive many of our poets—Homer or Edgar Allan Poe—and dramatists—Shakespeare. But the novelist has traditionally been sketched in the public eye with very specific lines. Dickens, bucking the system by rising from nothing, remains a paradigm. I don't like categories for novelists, but some novelists rely on earning their incomes through "popular" patronage and others supplement this through the sanction of university appointments and federal and private grants. Does this create more of a cultural divide than the categories of "literary" and "genre" fiction?

Random thoughts--not sure the dots connect to form any particular picture. Read up on some of the links below, and their links, and feel free to post the dots of your own thoughts here!

*Related links:

David Liss's thoughts: http://davidliss.com/?p=982#comments

Laura Lippman's thoughts: http://www.journalscape.com/LauraLippman/2010-08-25-08:17/

Tess Gerritsen's thoughts: http://www.tessgerritsen.com/blog/reviews-bias-and-women-writers/

Jennifer Vanderbes's thoughts: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Jennifer_Vanderbes/jodi-picoult-jennifer-weiner-franzen_b_693143_58419108.html