Novels are not being read in the same way that they were thirty years ago. They have remained part of the cultural conversation in the media, but there’s not the same level of excitement and buzz around books as when I was younger. This could be an effect of my own ageing, but a lot of the evidence seems to back it up.
But, at the same time, people are reading more than ever. Even with the push-to-video, a lot of people’s time is spent reading text-based websites. At some level, this is a zero-sum game. Every minute spent reading Facebook is time that could be spent reading a novel (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, once declared that the company’s biggest competitor was sleep). But it’s interesting how novels have failed to capitalise on this growth.
I wonder if part of this is that few novels reflect the way that people read online, the discordant, chaotic nature of it. How the threads of different stories are merged together, sometimes with wildly different tones – what the Content Mines podcast referred to as ‘structural dissonance’.
Some theories have it that people read novels to get a coherent experience that they are missing from life. I’m not suggesting that is done away with. Rather, I’m interested in a medium/style that reflects the stream, the way we are reading now. Having the narratives more broken up.
I’ve read some novels which reflected this, but they were intentionally written as novels about the Internet. The closest thing I’ve found are novels written as oral history, like Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant or Daisy Jones and the Six. I like that people can skip characters they are not interested in. They can follow the whole thing in different ways. Just like we do with the Internet. The text is more than a relentless line of paragraphs.
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