Writer laments short attention spans and decline of nuanced criticism in age of social media
Excerpted from an article by Sian Cain
(The Guardian, July 2018)
In the face of plummeting sales of literary fiction, the writer Howard Jacobson has declared that the novel is not dead: the problem is the modern reader, who apparently lacks the attention span to enjoy the intellectual challenge of reading.
In a speech in London, Jacobson lamented the distractions facing today’s reader and the decline of nuanced criticism that had come with didactic social media.
He said: “The infinite distractions of the Jumpin’ Jack Flash screen, so deceptively alluring compared to the nun-like stillness of the page, whose black marks you can neither scroll through nor delete. The brutalism of those means of expression, which the unironic internet has put at our disposal: our thumbs up/thumbs down culture in which everything is forgotten, discourse is reduced to statement, dramatic speech is inconceivable, words denote nothing but what is on our minds, writers are only as good as the side they’re on, and meaning is what we intend to mean.
“To say that reading more closely resembles study is not to be a killjoy: concentration and enjoyment are not opposites. Strange that when everyone’s running marathons and otherwise raising sweat for the hell of it, working hard at a novel is thought to take the fun away.”
“I think the novel is in quite good health. I think there are some terrific novels being written. It is a puzzle to me that novels sell fewer and fewer copies than they used to unless you write children stories or mystery stories … the novel is in good health. The problem is the reader.”
While admitting he had no solution for falling literary fiction sales, which have been on a steady decline in the UK since 2011, Jacobson said the relationship between readers and books had to change – not the kinds of books that were being written. “Numbers of readers of serious literature are dwindling,” he said. “What will change that? Will people fall out of love with the screen? Eventually will we just get sick of that? Will we recover our powers of concentration? … Until people fall out of love with the screen, I don’t know what will win them back to writing.”
Addressing a question from an audience member who reported feeling pressurised by publishers to write a “page-turner”, Jacobson said: “Tell them to go to hell. You describe the tragic state we are in. When someone tells me they couldn’t put my novel down, I feel they haven’t read what I’ve done. If you read me, you’re going to want to put me down … what you’ve said encapsulates the problem at the moment.
“It is so deeply insulting to readers, that this is all they want to do. Here’s the challenge: how do we educate the reader, so they don’t want to want it? I’ve never understood why anyone wants to read those books. ‘Who committed the murder?’ Who the hell cares?”
