Novel Reading a "Cultic" Activity By 2034: How Fares the Prediction?

Back in a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast Philip Roth predicted that in a quarter of a century, and likely less, novel reading would be "cultic," invoking the number of people still engaged in "reading Latin poetry in the original" as a point of comparison for how little it would be done (the circle of novel readers not quite as small as that, but not much greater).

In 2025 we are about two-thirds of the way to twenty-five years from his standpoint. Personally I think that his prediction for the state of things in 2034 is more dire than the reality is likely to be--but not so very much more dire. Consider how

* In the late '00s and early '10s young adult books were all the rage, and the trajectory that ended up following. At least part of the story was a lack of excitement about books for adults, and "adults" looking for easier reads, as well as young adult interest, with all that suggests for the vibrancy of letters and for the prevailing level of literacy--while the way the bubble popped circa 2015 without anything to compare since can seem suggestive of people of all ages doing even less reading than that.

* Whole genres of popular fiction have withered and all but vanished (consider where action-adventure fiction stands today relative to where it was circa 1990), as in other cases we have seen stagnation (certainly to go by how, for example, the "club" of bestselling authors of other kinds of thriller has seen just the same old names from year to year, decade to decade, old names surviving on likely dwindling numbers of old loyalists, instead of new successes).

* Even as Big Publishing mounted its counter-revolution against the e-book with sensational success, the mass-market paperback still disappeared from the shops for lack of buyers--and how the media treated both events as virtually non-stories.

* The slight impact of even recent bestsellers on the wider culture, as seen in the fact that for many years the film adaptations of even colossal bestsellers simply do not become first-rank blockbusters the way they did a short time earlier; and how, even with pop culture a principal terrain of the kulturkampf and all its obscene noxiousness, books constitute an ever-smaller part of the controversy, especially when we get away from the mainly symbolic fights over very limited aspects of the contents of school libraries. (By contrast the kind of arguments that people had over a book like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and certainly the way in which a serious social scientist like William Whyte discussed the book as sociologically relevant in his study of "the organization man,", aren't even a possibility now.)

Consider, too, the implications of a declining interest in literature and the humanities on college campuses that has gone so far as talk of the "end of the English major"--which I suspect is not just a response to the sneers at those subjects by the morons who pass for thought-leaders, or the (very understandable) worries about the earning prospects of those who major in them in a time of ever more outrageous tuition, worsening prospects for college graduates and a tendency on the part of employers to reward more vocationally-oriented course work and the demonstration of quantitative skills at the expense of other kinds of credentials and training, but simple disinterest among the young. The causes of the situation are numerous, but one that I do think worth stressing what Mr. Roth's biographer Blake Bailey acknowledges after a long career as a biographer of such figures, that the day when endeavoring to write "the great American novel" seemed a heroic endeavor is behind us, simply because "Nobody's paying attention"--a remark that, in contrast with the boosterism we usually get about book sales, the publishing business, reading, when we get coverage of them at all seems to me a breath of fresh air for its frankness. Indeed, even those who really find themselves taken with the written word are, if fancying a career that would lead to something better than a crummy working class existence, probably more likely to set up a camera and try to become "influencers" than pour their heart and soul into a manuscript, especially as the disappointment self-publishing has been proves ever harder to deny, and the never very likely path to acceptance on Park Avenue only continues to grow more implausible.