The novel was called a novel because it was novel: new. The first English novel is popularly supposed to have been Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, which was published in 1741. Richardson was a close contemporary of Pope and Dr Johnson, and his novel is a set of letters about her love-life by the serving-maid Pamela.
Was it novel? The form existed earlier, in other languages. All that a novel requires is well-defined characters, a plot, and a resolution. Webster’s characterises it thus: “a fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech and thoughts of the characters”. Many classic novels, especially in the last century, do not live up to this definition.
Take for instance Joyce’s Ulysses, or even Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. They play around with the form of the novel, but in truth are more akin to journalism. They are journals. And some novels antedate Richardson by centuries: Don Quixote, the 12th century Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, and the granddaddy of them all, going back perhaps to the third millennium BCE, the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.
The novel as a work of fiction, with plot and characters, has lasted a relatively short time. Fiction, in the mid-18th century, meant a work of the imagination. The best example, in our times, is Ms Rowling’s Harry Potter. But such novels are not classics – not yet. An essay by Prasenjit Chowdhury in these columns on April 22 mentioned Time magazine’s 2005 all-time list. It included from the 20th century, besides Ulysses and Midnight’s Children, Martin Amis’s Money, Orwell’s 1984, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Forster’s A Passage to India, Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and McEwan’s Atonement.
Many of these books differ in style and substance from the works that made the novel what it was: a book that depicts reality. Dickens has been much reviled in our time, but that is for his sentimentality.
No one doubts the truth in his depictions of society. After him came Stendhal, Flaubert, Twain, Zola and Proust, even D H Lawrence. Social realism, the willingness to call a spade a spade, marked the coming-of age of the novel as the highest form of literature. It supplanted poetry and the drama.
Real books
Then came the flowering of American literature (Twain was a harbinger, as Hemingway says). Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser are hardly read anymore, but they wrote real books rooted in real existences – in Dreiser’s case almost painfully so. Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck followed their lead. They knew what they were writing about, because they had been there. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath started as a journalistic assignment. The paladins of the novel as an art form in the 20th century – Joyce is the readiest example – thought nothing new could be done with the novel, so they made it an art form.
Somehow, in the last century, the novel became identified with high art, a position poetry had held in the palmy days of Tennyson and Browning, and was to hold again in Eliot’s time. But as Great Britain declined as a world power, so did the British novel. The post-1945 novels are pale and epicene in their depiction of a pale and epicene society. Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954) was an aberration. No one – least of all Amis – took it forward as a description of social reality.
American novels in the second half of the 20th century also went into decline. The acclaimed novelists of the last 50 years are Bellow, Updike, Mailer and Irving. All of them attempted to drift into high art. But the trend-setter among novels in the second half of the 20th century is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a story based on interviews with murderers, and which is not fiction at all. In the 1960s and ’70s, a new kind of writing sprang to life in the USA which was truly novel. The journalism of that time – best exemplified by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and the late Hunter Thompson, and the Despatches from Vietnam by Michael Herr – made the storyteller a part of the story. Gone was the distinction between objective and subjective journalism. All journalism is subjective, because it is told by a person with feelings.
Wolfe, when he began to write novels in the late 1980s, was attacked by the four novelists mentioned above because he chose to report, to go into the circles of society he was writing about and take notes. This is anathema to the practitioners of art. How can a novel be rooted in reality?
The fact is that writers of non-fiction will always be attracted to the novel, because it represents Art. Good journalism will always sell, because people are interested in truth and reality. The novel will continue to work so long as it is rooted in truth and reality.
In search of truth
This is recognised by novelists. Note that, in the last 10 years, those who cry “The novel is dead” – notably Naipaul – have published novels. The novel might be dead as a work of art. But it will survive as long as it practises the best skills of journalism.
Readers of literature will always have a regard for truth. Escapist writing is all very well once in a way, but no one can read it for ever. Tom Wolfe – the best commentator writing today on non-fiction, because he has Been There, and also co-edited an anthology called The New Journalism (1973) – begins his introduction to that anthology:
I doubt if many of the aces I will be extolling… went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a ‘new’ journalism… I knew they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world…. The novelists are all out there right now ransacking the literary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they stand. Damn it all, Saul [Bellow], the Huns have arrived….
Wolfe adds that the journalists he knew when he started out, in the 60s, invariably wanted to write novels. Many did. This is true of English-writing journalists in India, as well, even now. Some of the best journalists of my generation – the 1980s – have either published novels or have one in the bottom drawer. But their works are not fantasy; they are based on the things their creators have seen, and often reported.
However, this craving to be recognised as an Artist is out of tune with the times. What are the biggest sellers in the market? They are mostly management and self-help books. The better among them sell, because they are founded in reality. There are others.  President Kalam’s Vision 2020 continues to sell, not only because of its author’s status. The memoirs of ex-ministers may sell because they are expected to reveal juicy bits of news, but they do not stay on bestseller lists unless they contain good writing.
The truth is that good non-fiction has always been appreciated by readers. Novels sell only when they have received awards – The Inheritance of Loss, The Namesake – or when they are new in form or content. They always sell when they contain good reporting. Chetan Bhagat’s novel on IIT told what it is like to belong to a very exclusive club; his novel set in a call centre told what it is like to belong to an industry everyone’s talking about. They fulfilled a need to know in the reader.
The New Journalists, in the 1960s and ’70s, used the tricks of fiction to sell their stuff. Tom Wolfe writes in his Preface to The New Journalism:
…what is it precisely – in terms of technique – that has made the New Journalism as ‘absorbing’ and ‘gripping’ as the short story, and often more so?… One: There are four specific devices, all of them realistic, that underlie the emotionally involving quality of the most powerful prose, whether fiction or non-fiction. Two: Realism is not merely another literary approach or attitude. The introduction of detailed realism into English literature in the eighteenth century was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology…. For anyone, in fiction or non-fiction, to try to improve literary technique by abandoning social realism would be like an engineer trying to improve upon machine technology by abandoning electricity.
Wolfe details these devices in his Introduction: scene-by scene construction (“resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative”), point of view (writing the story through the eyes of someone who was there), dialogue, and recording – recording everything the characters did.
I have quoted Wolfe in full – because he is, even more than Hunter Thompson, who was a cult hero – the exemplar of The New Journalism. Thompson wrote one novel, The Rum Diaries, which sold a little on the basis of his reputation. Wolfe did much better. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), was a bestseller. He took eleven years to write his second, A Man in Full (1998), whose hardcover edition sold 1.2 million copies of its first edition. Neither book still sells. Wolfe’s intention was not to write high art, but to present a faithful picture of America at the time. All he aspired for was the status of current bestseller.
When I was briefed to write this essay, I was uncomfortable. The words used by the editor were: “how non-fiction is becoming popular; how non-fiction is being perceived today - no longer dry, academic exercises”. But ever since I discovered the joys of the New Journalism – that was in 1987, some 18 years after I discovered the joys of the novel – I have believed that good non-fiction holds just as high a place in literature as good fiction, and that it is anything but dry and academic.
Indian journals have rarely espoused the New Journalism. For one thing, American journals like Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and even Scanlan’s Monthly routinely paid journalists such as Thompson and Joe Eszterhas (“Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse” in Rolling Stone, reprinted in The New Journalism) fat expense accounts for months on end to do their stories. “Do their stories” often meant spending those same months on end living with the characters they were writing about or researching their background. For another, Indian journals in English rarely do anything new, at least where style is concerned.
Debonair in its previous avatar, until 1991, under the editorship successively of Dilip Thakore, Anil Dharker and Adil Jussawalla, did carry new writing, but it was ultimately a failed experiment. Everyone in the field speaks nostalgically of Debonair, but no one seeks to replicate it. It is a failure of Indian journalism. Non-fiction will always sell, if it is rooted in truth and good reporting.
(Vijay Nambisan’s non-fiction book, ‘Bihar is in the Eye of the Beholder’, was published by Viking-Penguin India in 2000. It was since reissued as a paperback, and is going into a second edition this month. It has also been translated into Hindi.)