The Relevance of the Novel to Our Thinking About Society

Reading my way through the more popular sociology of the 1950s I remember that one of the minor surprises was the extent to which its authors--a William Whyte or a C. Wright Mills, for example--was able to cite a good deal of contemporary fiction for the sake of illustrating what they discussed. (Mills, for example, brings up works like Mark Benny's The Big Wheel.)

One doesn't see that anymore.

One reason may well be that social scientists, just like everyone else, read less fiction, which would mean that even if they did read more fiction it would be less useful as a point of reference as they tried to explain themselves.

However, while this seems to me very plausible it is also the case that contemporary fiction is a good deal less useful for such purposes than it used to be. The industry's extreme turn to escapist genre work without any interest in the lives of almost everyone on the planet; and the postmodernist dominance of the remainder, including what most call "literature" today; mean that there is unlikely to be any sociological substance or interest in what they produce--or the heads of its writers, as an examination of the sad and sorry work of the most celebrated of them goes to show.