Like a gopher defending its golf course, a novelist is naturally guarded when encountering an item titled The Novel, Who Needs It? I spent much of my reading-energy at war with this opinionated little book, and I am sorry to report that in the end, it won. Joseph Epstein, its distinguished author, has made a name for himself with his crackerjack prose, conservative common sense, and take-no-prisoners reviewing style. Whether we sympathize with his tastes or not, he has the power to communicate them. And yet he often rubs me the wrong way. His seething animus against Philip Roth seems excessively personal. Where the topic of sex is concerned, he fusses like Lady Bracknell, even if at times he is hilariously on the mark: “Don’t ask what Count Aleksey Vronsky would have requested of Anna if Philip Roth had written Anna Karenina.” Woody Allen good, that. Epstein is invariably quick to jab, and the kicking mood comes over him. 

However, if after reading this book I am not exactly an Epstein fan, I have gained a deeper appreciation of his considerable virtues. Where formerly I saw the narrowness of egotism and the taint of envy, I now see a strong personality, a forceful arbiter of taste, and an erudite man of letters who has truly lived the life.

Epstein’s answer to the question The Novel, Who Needs It? is everyone. All of us, if we wish to find meaning in life, must read serious fiction: “Without the help of the novel we lose the hope of gaining a wide and, in the instances of the great novelists, more complex view of life, its mystery, its meaning, its point.” In his ambition for literature, in his belief in literature as a form of soulcraft, Epstein has assumed the mantle of Matthew Arnold. It will be helpful, then, to unravel the various Arnoldian strands in Epstein’s thinking.

Arnold was a strange amalgam of a man, half-dandy, half-headmaster, a scholar gypsy who confronted the Victorian establishment and cried out for the fresh air of “life.” What accounts for the superiority of William Wordsworth to Robert Burns, John Keats, and Heinrich Heine? It is that Wordsworth “deals with more of life. … He deals with life, as a whole, more powerfully.” For Arnold, “It is important … to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.” Similarly, Epstein says of the novel, “Above all it is the book of life.” Great fiction, as delivered by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and George Eliot, “turns facts into ideas, where they, the ideas, seem so much more vivid than when standing alone.” 

The obvious difference is that Epstein plumps, rather loudly, for novelists ahead of poets and playwrights. He dwells more than Arnold does on the pure richness of the reading experience: “I do not worry overmuch about having lost the plots of novels, because I am confident that they have nonetheless left a rich deposit in my mind of a kind that, I like to believe, goes well beyond recollecting the details of their plots.” I find this remark both original and persuasive. It certainly holds true of my own enjoyment of Charles Dickens (one of the lucky authors to receive the coveted Epstein seal of approval), whose plots and titles wander off in my memory and tend to lose sight of each other.

Like Arnold, Epstein, despite his relaxed attitude toward their “details,” is a champion of well-constructed plots and of their universal significance given the reality of human nature. Erich Auerbach and E. H. Gombrich were more sensitive to the intersection of artistic creativity, historical setting, and the psychology of perception, but that is a relatively minor matter that refines and does not fracture Arnoldian humanism. Epstein shares Arnold’s expansive horizons, and likewise, favors Arnold’s method of juxtaposition. He quotes with favor Arnold’s withering comparison of two novels with adulterous heroines, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. He should, in fairness, have mentioned L’Éducation Sentimentale, another novel of Gustave Flaubert’s that looks hard at adultery, a novel that, from our historical vantage, and with respect to general reputation, may be said to answer Arnold’s devastating charge, that the author of Madame Bovary “hangs an atmosphere of bitterness, irony, impotence; not a person in the book to rejoice or console us; the springs of freshness are not there to create such personages [because] “the treasures of compassion, tenderness, insight” are lacking. 

Flaubert is one of Epstein’s punching bags, and I accept that Arnold was right: Tolstoy wrote the better novel. But not only does Epstein omit to discuss L’Éducation Sentimentale, he discounts its influence, including its fruitful irrigating of Rabbit, Run, for Updike was one of the rare American writers able to absorb Flaubert’s genius. As regards the four Rabbit novels, Epstein is dismissive of their success: “One feels something missing, an element of gravity perhaps, a sense that the style employed is more significant than the content.” Okay, sure, fair enough. But this is not generous, and elsewhere Epstein at least includes Updike’s work in a list of novels that would tell “more about the history and psychological condition of the United States than a general history of the subject.”

Not all the books that make the list are said to rank among the great novels. Epstein is onto something. It is good for literature that we distinguish historical value from artistic merit, and I admire his tough logic, even if I do not always second his tastes. He gives an extraordinarily high place to Willa Cather, whom he regards as “the best American novelist of the past century.” He tells science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction to take a hike. And he has little to say about comedy. A critic who never mentions P. G. Wodehouse, a corrector of taste who cannot relish the comic masterpiece that is Uncle Fred in Springtime, is not a man after my own heart.

In the landmark 1853 Preface to his poems, Arnold addresses the problem of style by demoting “over-curiousness of expression” in favor of “the spirit of the whole.” Similarly, Epstein cautions his readers against “novelists who rely on style.” Not only does Updike suffer the lash for stylistic excess, but so too does James Joyce. Epstein knows what he is about, but he hedges with the word rely. In a sense, all novelists rely on style. More important, the ascent of style correlates generally to the thickening of historical consciousness that marks the passage of time in literary tradition. When Marshall McLuhan formulated his thesis, in his 1964 book Understanding Media, that “the medium is the message,” he was voicing a lesson he had learned from Auerbach, Gombrich, and, above all, from the stylistic experiments of Joyce, who set the stage for another genius, Samuel Beckett, a consummate stylist and a profound novelist whom Epstein entirely neglects. But still, it must be admitted that Epstein has a point. Obsession with style is rarely a virtue.

I am more at odds with Epstein’s Arnoldian tendency to think of literature as a substitute for religion. For me, this is no mere quirk of judgment but reveals Epstein at his least persuasive. He writes, “The major religions, however valuable their moral instruction, cannot hope entirely to cover the vast waterfront of moral confrontations that life, that gremlinesque trickster, continues to set in our paths.” This statement may well gain the reader’s assent, though, upon closer inspection, it suggests that “moral instruction” is a matter of moral laws and not moral life. Epstein returns to this topic: “Religion, for those who have faith, remains the great instructor and arbiter of morality. But the novel deals with morality on a more subtle level: it deals with the morality of specific actions and thoughts in a wide range of particulars.” The word arbiter enhances “great instructor” and fills a certain gap. It assigns a role to conscience. On the other hand, subtlety is a crucial test for Epstein, a recurrent marker of literary excellence, and yet, to my thinking, there is no subtler moral statement than “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Shakespeare knew the temper of that blade, as did Tolstoy, as did Evelyn Waugh. 

It seems to me that Epstein’s Arnoldian take on religion and literature lends itself to a misunderstanding of both topics, which, when rightly understood, stand in a kind of dialectical tension. A good example is Cervantes, whose importance Epstein acknowledges by observing Cervantes’ great re-readability. Curiously, though, Don Quixote falls under one of Epstein’s more severe strictures, part of which I have already quoted: “Those novelists who rely on style, along with those who rely on irony, aesthetically satisfying and entertaining though they can be, tend not to be among the most powerful, the truly great novelists.” Cervantes does not rely on style as Joyce does. But he most certainly relies on irony (however we construe “rely”). The Spanish author, who is widely credited for inventing every novelistic trick ever conceived in a paroxysm of paper and ink, claims again and again, with everlasting irony, that his work is a “true” history. With a parodistic wink to the romance tradition, he even claims that he did not write it: it is the work of a Muslim historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, translated by a nameless Spaniard before it fell into Cervantes’s hands—Eschenbach’s Parzival had employed the services of a fictitious Muslim historian back in the thirteenth century. Further, we can say of Don Quixote, as of Shakespeare’s plays, that it stands in a profoundly ironic relation to the Gospels, which are everywhere quoted by both writers (Naseeb Shaheen’s Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays runs to about 800 dense pages). 

To this mode of everlasting irony, of which a modern history could be written, Epstein is not blind. In one of his early chapters, he makes the isolated remark that “at the heart” of the novel’s “method is the hypothetical posing of questions—chiefly moral questions—through the lives of imagined characters.” True enough. But there is uncannily more at stake in “the hypothetical posing of questions” when a reader’s entire worldview is at issue, as is the case in the potential inversions of wisdom and folly, the Pauline legacy of the wise fool, that Erasmus (with a nod to “Saint Socrates”) bequeathed in literary form to Shakespeare and Cervantes, not to mention Rabelais, who is another one missing from Epstein’s account of the novel. Fielding’s Tom Jones and Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, both of which Epstein admires, partake of this legacy, with comic and tragic insight, respectively.

Where Cervantes and Shakespeare, who were constantly dealing with intense censorship, can go to great lengths to disappear behind their works—in fact, they are distantly akin to Flaubert in this respect—Epstein asks us to put ourselves “in the place of the novelist”: 

By “identifying” with the author of a novel, we soon become acquainted with the technical aspects of the novel—why its author chose a first- rather than a third-person narrator, decided not to dramatize certain important scenes, supplied detail in some places and withheld it in others, and much else, and are thus able to read the novel more deeply. 

Well, yes and no. I am incapable of “identifying” with Leo Tolstoy, Epstein’s all-time numero uno, just ahead of Dostoevsky and Proust. I am not a nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat, nor was meant to be. Am I being nudged to follow Epstein’s example and read more biographies? What about C. S. Lewis’s warning against the “personal heresy”? On the other hand, some of us can imagine putting ourselves “in the place of the novelist,” at least insofar as remembering that every page was once a gut-wrenching blank, and refining a sense of the artistic decisions that met the writer at every turn. As regards criteria for proper appreciation, Epstein turns to the economist and scholar Alexander Gerschenkron, who held that a “good book … must be (1) interesting, (2) memorable, and (3) re-readable.” These are first-rate criteria, and the method is typical of Epstein. Throughout The Novel, Who Needs It? he fortifies his discussion with luminous quotations from his superb bibliography, which enhance his successful efforts at refined discrimination. 

If in reviewing this book I have maintained my old habit of jousting with its learned author, it is by now a friendly argument. Epstein’s fans will love The Novel, Who Needs It? Among its signal strengths are a brilliant defense of the novel against the forces that threaten it (e.g., digital culture, self-absorbed academics, and “sanctimony literature”), as well as lively anecdotes, provocative lists and comparisons, jaunty turns of phrase, and a unique concern with one’s changing experience of great literature over the course of a lifetime. It is a terrific book, eminently readable, combative, and fun.