Where have all the big books gone?

The demise of reading has gone hand in hand with society’s demand for instant gratification.

William Hurt in the film adaptation of Moby Dick.

The big books. The ambitious books, the life-changing books, the long books, the time-consuming books, the dense books. Not the “classics” because classics aren’t necessarily big and big isn’t necessarily classic (whatever that means, anyway) but the important books our culture used to produce but, today, we rarely see on bookshelves, where have they gone?

Why aren’t (many) people writing them? And more importantly, why aren’t people reading them?

This is a not a new concern. Charles Bukowski in 1990 asked: “... well, where are they?/ the Hemingways, the T.S. Eliots, the Pounds … dead, I know/ but where are the re-/ placements, where are the new/ others?’

Poet and writer Charles Bukowski.

What was a casual question back then seems to have a new ­urgency now.

There are lots of reasons, and I’d like to explore some of them here. I suspect technology, in its various forms, is taking over the jobs we used to trust our brains to do: critical thinking, imagination, reasoning and speech and (civilised) argument and social intercourse at a personal and public level. We say, “Oh, well, I’m too busy to tackle Anna Karenina,” then pick up our phone to check the latest tweet.

We don’t value time in the same way we used to – slow, precious, filled with good smells and sounds and ideas and meaningful things. We’re happy to waste time. Like, surely, we’ll get it back? We’re happy to fill the gap with more technology, updated phones and watches. And the result? We’ve become lazy, and lonely. We’ve privatised our inner spaces, sold off our opinions, let someone else make Pixar and Marvel dreams for us. And worse, for too many people now, everything’s about money. We’ve shat on our curiosity, given up on the daily awe that came from sensing our place in nature, the consolations and compromises that made civilisation possible, and pleasant. The result? Each new generation bleeding out its limited reserves of empathy, understanding and wisdom.

Readers seem hung up on plot. Easy plots. Familiar plots. Plots that come from and return to a screen. Problem being, the big books are about big characters: Miss Havisham, Elizabeth Hunter, Captain Ahab, Tom Joad. It takes time to build up a complex, flawed life on a page, each verb and adjective competing for the smallest breath and bit of meaning. Even when contemporary writers have a crack, readers falter, stray, give up. There’s something easier, more immediate to hand. Something involving the discovery of a body on a beach and working out how it go there. Harold Bloom: “I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

Ironically, it’s the loss of critics like Bloom that’s allowed the problem to fester. The loss of literary criticism generally, space in newspapers, reviews themselves (ironically, surviving in 50-word online grabs where they’re easily ignored).

Today, there are fewer places to publish extracts, to make meandering explorations that interrogate context, subtext, the way authors’ lives morph onto the page, how we needn’t make the mistakes of the past, how too many of our views are founded on faulty assumptions.

All of this might seem ho-hum: “It’s a shame but, you know, the world’s changing.”

If it wasn’t for what we risked losing. That is, the understanding of what it means to be a human on Earth, a human among millions who’ve lived and died with the same urges and joys and terrors and disappointments. How else to connect with the tribe of humanity that’s fallen through time’s long ruin? Bloom again: “We read deeply for various reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better.”

Keira Knightley in a scene from film Anna Karenina.

Or as Jonathan Franzen put it in How to Be Alone: “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude … in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”

The very idea of reading deeply; of making connections in order to become better people (or at least remain sane, or maybe even happy). But now, visual seems to have won out over text; we have a poorer understanding of irony, sarcasm, the art of persuasion, voice, a well-turned sentence, the art of choosing the best word (even grammar, spelling); we can’t grasp complex sentences, let alone the formal language that glues so many big books together. In short, we’re out of practice. Kids grow up without books in the house, without reading role models (family, let alone politicians and public figures, having been replaced with sporty types). No one demands sustained reading and schools are too busy teaching “multi-modal” texts (more screens) while avoiding quality books lest they disadvantage non-readers. Meanwhile, the books that are read are short, plotish, weighed down with well-meaning but yawn-worthy attempts at solving the world’s problems. Despite schools’ mission to create readers, at the end of the day they leave more waiting for a bus that’ll never come. Apart from this, schools and universities are busy “de-colonising” bookshelves, removing Pip because (I suspect) the local gauleiter has never read Great Expectations. In short, there goes the Western canon. Anyway, chances are younger English teachers haven’t read much, or they’ve been co-opted from the geography department to make up the numbers.

And what about the writers? Bukowski: “I don’t ask for/ Dostoevski, there’s no replacement/ for Feodor Mikhailovich./ but/ these now, what are/ they: making their tiny/ splashes, what/ practiced ineptness, what/ boredom of/ language, what a/ crass bastardly trick/ against print/ against pages …”

The reasons are complex, but the outcomes clear: writers are no longer culturally important; big books are rarely produced by profit-driven publishers, therefore fewer are written, creating a self-fulfilling Coriolis effect of big books down little drains. But mostly, big books are hard to write. Think of Patrick White churning out an Eye of the Storm or Riders in the Chariot: a hundred thousand-plus handwritten words, typed up, corrected, typed again, “oxy-welded”, years and years of solid, thankless, grinding warfare with an Olivetti and the English language to produce a masterpiece that, even then, required a visionary ­publisher (Ben Huebsch) and well-read public to give it any chance at all.

And talking about the journey. Perhaps part of the problem is that we’ve lost interest in the journey on which writers can take us over our lives. From comics, to pre-franchised, pre-teen Tolkein, the discovery of Holden Caulfield, the oh-so-clever twenty-something Infinite Jest, then to something serious, Bolano, perhaps, and on and on it goes, the road less travelled that’s no longer travelled at all. And what have we lost? The unbroken chain of meaning from Homer to Dante, Chaucer to Shakespeare, to a 20th century profusion of styles that offered Joyce in the morning and Hesse in the afternoon.

For me, as a 12 or 13 year old, it was Dickens. To think, someone had actually dreamed up Micawber and Betsey Trotwood! Without that narrative, that connection, how do we even know what we’re missing, or misunderstanding? Are we ready to give up the collective memory that, according to Italo Calvino, holds together “the imprint of the past and the plan for the future …”

Or is it simply that we no longer know how to be alone anymore? Bloom said it was all about finding a mind “more original than our own”. But now, we’re all creators, posting a hundred daily autobiographies on TikTok. Ironically, this seems to be leaving us more lonely than ever and, having withdrawn within ourselves, having discovered we’re bored with what’s being said and sung and tweeted, we can’t work out what’s next?

Maybe it’s time to commit. Maybe it’s time to (re-)rewire our brains to work in years, months, instead of fractions of seconds. Maybe it’s time to stop saying, “I’ll wait for the movie”. Maybe it’s time to admit we all have a little of Ahab’s obsession, Humbert’s lustings – maybe there’s a bit of Christian Stead’s controlling Sam Pollit in all us.

In short, maybe we are the book and the book is us. Let’s admit, as Stead did when writing The Man Who Loved Children, the best way to exorcise the past is to write (and read) about it. This, as it turns out, isn’t a desirable but a necessary thing. Shall we admit, in the end, the questions the big books pose no longer interest us because we no longer interest ourselves?

Stephen Orr is an award-winning novelist. He will be a guest at Adelaide Writers’ Week on Wednesday 5 March.