What is the purpose of fiction?

As a (temporarily inactive) novelist, I’m always thinking about fiction and what its purpose is. The thing that haunts me is that it appears to have become purely a medium of entertainment. (See “Where Is the Novel Headed?”)

In that post, I cited a 2017 headline from The Guardian that sounded the alarm: “Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically.” I can’t think that things have improved after that, so I’m assuming publishers got the message and have made literary fiction a niche mainly for well-known, already successful authors (Ian McEwan, Jennifer Egan, Franzen, Kingsolver, et al.). Whereas twenty years ago they’d take a chance on my Parts Unknown, now the odds are just too great that a debut literary novel will flounder in this market.

But if fiction has become almost one hundred percent a medium of entertainment, where exactly along the way did we lose the reading public?

From my own experience as a novelist, I think it might have to do with technology. Specifically with the technology to stream music, audiobooks, and podcasts, along with the demand on our attention that came with social media.

For example, I last signed with an agent in 2008, just as Facebook was taking off. Tech emphasis was on devices, with the iPod and the new iPhone dominating, but books were still fairly analog, and the publishing business was not aware yet that Amazon was going to put immense pressure on it via the Kindle and price undercutting. When I signed with my last agent, it was still reasonable to think publishers were operating under traditional strategies, but that was already changing.

Entertainment rises to the top of consumers’ agendas when demands on their time increase. And demands on time come from more than family and career. The culture throws things at us that have to be accepted or ignored, but to ignore them might keep us out of the public conversation. Cultural literacy is a thing, and if you can’t talk the talk, how can you be part of the community? It’s only intensified since 2008.

It was also in that era that genre novels written with a little more style than average began to get credit as being literary fiction. Usually thrillers, these books tended to rise high on the bestseller lists because they actually weren’t literary fiction. Reading them put you in the know, in the clique, so having a copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on the subway signaled that to others. You were in on the conversation.

In the early nineties I sat next to a woman who was reading Yukio Mishima on a plane. I almost asked her to marry me on the spot.

So what is fiction’s purpose if it’s been rendered as nothing more than another entertainment option competing for a slim pie-slice of our precious time?

It used to be able to instruct. To reflect society. To expose us to lives and places we weren’t familiar with. To impress us with the possibilities of our own language. And, yes, to entertain, but it could entertain while doing some or all of these other things.

Technology has allowed us to view things through a lens that feels like our own but might have been fitted to us by algorithms.

The ever-increasing demand on our free time, when we have any at all, has required fiction to adapt by entertaining first. This in turn required literary fiction writers to hollow out their work so its entertaining properties glowed hotter than any other aspect. It reduced the emphasis on language and its musical potential. It demanded a more neutral style. It homogenized creativity. And it forced a lot of fine writers either to comply with the new standards or to do something else with their talents.

Fiction also used to provoke. Sometimes I think society has evolved in such a way as to make people averse to provocation. Social media has addicted us to positivity and reassurance that we view the world the right way. To provoke today is to risk being labeled toxic. It’s tempting to imagine how a provocative novel like Native Son would perform now. Novels were inventive ways to tell us what was wrong in society, but we don’t like spending our spare time on difficult social problems now. We want to see resolutions to problems. Even better, we want to escape from them. To that end, technology has allowed us to view things through a filtered lens that feels like our own but might have been fitted to us by algorithms. Being provoked by a powerful novel could knock us out of those comfortable thought patterns and disturb us even more than the author intended. This is why so much writing today comes with trigger warnings.

I hold out some hope that fiction might regain some of its former purpose over time, but as long as the publishing business is profiting from the pure-entertainment model, that evolution is a ways off. All those New York editors with their masters degrees and PhDs in English Lit., and they can’t sign anything but romance, YA, fantasy, and whodunits. I imagine they yearn for a broadening of fiction’s purpose as well.

One bright spot in all of this is the rich variety of literary fiction in short form. Thousands of small magazines, like my own The Disappointed Housewife, publish work that wouldn’t get a second look by the Big 5 publishers. These artists can spread their wings and write what their creative impulses compel them to write, and there’s an appreciative readership for it too.  

For now literary fiction is Underground Lit., like the old Soviet samizdat. Who knows? Maybe the market will catch up with us one of these days.