Can a Book Change the World?

words and ideas can change the world by Nick Kenrick

Today’s Writing Music: “Son’s Gonna Rise” (feat. Robert Randolph) - Citizen Cope

Today’s Reading: How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

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Last week, singer Noel Gallagher, formerly of the rock band Oasis, got Twitter all riled up after he said in an interview that he only reads nonfiction, as novels, full of made-up stuff, are a waste of fucking time.

It’s not so shocking, in fact it is one of the laziest and least original arguments out there against fiction. (I recommend this very comprehensive analysis by Lincoln Michel for those who want to dig in deeper on the long history of the novel’s “usefulness” to society.)

Basically, as long as the novel has existed, it has been declared “useless” and/or “dead” because of the radio, television, movies, video games, the internet... one article in the 1920s in a major newspaper declared that with the rise of the ballroom dancing craze, and the coming of nice weather, it was unlikely anyone would still read novels by the end of that summer.

It occurs to me that you don't go around panicking about the end of any media you don't, on some level, love very very dearly.

Novels have been declared dead or near to death by Jules Verne, Walter Benjamin, Norman Mailer, Robert Coover, Leslie Fielder, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith… just last week, Mary Gaitskill published an excerpt from her upcoming book asking, “Will Literature Survive?” And yet it keeps surviving, in part because the form continues to morph and reinvent itself, finding new ways to be relevant in the face of each new pressure.

And still, I get the same sentiment, that fiction is somehow useless or a waste, all the time, and from people I enjoy a whole lot more than Noel Gallagher. I’ll also confess that there are times I feel it too. After four long years of a Trump presidency where every liberty I hold dear was threatened every minute, we’re still dealing with the aftermath: constant threats to our democracy as well as a Supreme Court that our nation's worst President haplessky stacked for his Evangelical enablers, now handing down misery after misery, tearing at just about everything I hold dear, and with no end in sight. This week alone has been an absolute nightmare and there’s surely more to come. And I'm going to sit down on Monday morning and… write some stuff I made up?

But let’s back up a second, and focus on Mr. Champagne Supernova and his disdain for fiction. I promise I’ll come back to the rest shortly.

When I tell my friends and neighbors what I do for a living, it's often met with earnest confusion. I live in an affluent area of New York State and the people I meet are usually “high-powered” in some way or another. Lawyers, doctors, stock traders, or something relating to business. They're successful people who work very hard and spend their free time judiciously.

Once in a while I’ll meet someone who surprises me by sharing how they also loved Cloud Atlas (shout out to you, Lenny)… recently a contractor told me how much he loved the work of “Jack Krakauer” in college (who wrote his two favorite books, Dharma Bums and Into The Wild) but often it’s Game of Thrones or Bridgerton or Harry Bosch. And, hell, I’m happy to hear it. Those are absolutely novels too. Anyone who makes room for reading any kind of fiction in their lives has my respect and appreciation.

But most people that I meet assure me that they love reading—just not fiction. What's the point? TV is easier and highly entertaining (no argument from me there) and reading nonfiction can help them in tangible ways. They read to learn about history, or business, or the world. Just last weekend a fellow dad told me he listens to a lot of audiobooks by famous business leaders like Bill Gates, often at 1.25 speed, though he's noticed they rarely provide much insight into why these people are so successful. He was annoyed because he wasn't getting the payoff he expected.

And hey, I can relate… I hate for my reading time to be wasted too. But I know that what constitutes a waste to me is not the same as what it is to him.

Readers like my friend want their investment of time (even at 1.25 speed) to pay off in some measurable way. They want useful knowledge that they didn't possess before, strategies for success in their business life that will lead to increased revenue, and so on. Even a celebrity memoir or a sprawling history can be useful if your colleagues and partners read them too and will be impressed by you for knowing a ton about Rebel Wilson, or the Napoleonic Wars.

I’m no different. There’s a lot I read just to keep up with Joneses in my own world—they just like Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård instead.

When we do hear about, for instance, the way that Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day supposedly inspired Jeff Bezos to start Amazon… its not encouraging that he badly misunderstood the meaning of the novel.

Or we might hear about a politician like Paul Ryan cites a college reading of Ayn Rand with an awakening into libertarianism. This makes me dry heave, but at least he successfully absorbed the selfish meaning behind The Fountainhead. (I’m not linking to that one.)

But these kinds of stories do at least lend credence to the importance of reading fiction. They show that the experience of a being inside of a novel can shape a burgeoning worldview (for better or worse) and inspire great (and awful) ideas in ways that can be linked to measurable success.

And I have had experiences reading books that awakened me too, of course. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was my first exposure to agnosticism and secular humanism as a teenager. It was one of those dividing line experiences for me—there was a Kristopher Jansma before Cat’s Cradle, and a Kristopher Jansma after.

And, fine, call me basic, but The Catcher in the Rye gripped me with its story of an alienated young guy calling out society for its phoniness. It changed my life in that it was the first time I read something in a classroom that I recognized myself in, and made me think I should write novels not just about elves and dragons, but what was really going on in my head and my heart.

But is this a phenomenon isolated to things we read as juveniles? Maybe, but I'm glad I read that and not Atlas Shrugged, you know?

When I read short stories and novels now, I don't necessarily expect to suddenly have my worldview stood on end, but part of me still hopes it might. And when I sit down to write, it is hard not to wish that what I spend so much energy on would solve real problems in the world. I worry all the time about our democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, gun violence… the list goes on and on.

In this frame of mind, it's easy to start yearning that writing novels and stories could *do* something. If I’m going to ask readers to spend hours and hours with them, and if I personally am going to work for years and years on them… it's natural to ache that I could just tell a story powerful enough to wake people up, just as I was once woken up by something. I don’t think it’s a bad aspiration at all, but quite quickly I find myself slipping into something that is bad—deciding that art is worthless unless it does do this.

Suddenly I’m asking so much of art that I’m no better than my neighbors who demand a work of fiction to help increase their annual net income to be worthwhile.

We’re both missing all the rest of its value.

I don't know anything about Noel Gallagher really, but Wikipedia tells me that he claims to have been inspired in 1983 by hearing The Smiths on the radio, and it made him wish he could write something as good as “This Charming Man.” Hate to break it to you, Noel, but a great song is no less “made up” than a great novel (though you can generally consume it in under four minutes). I wonder if Noel, or Johnny Marr for that matter, would be more comfortable asserting that a song could change the world? Maybe.

One difference here is that way more people listen to music than read novels. So even if we agree that a great book can change a person, there’s a big hurdle to a book changing the world.

According to a 2016 Pew Research poll, “Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read 4 books in the last 12 months.” And that’s books, not novels, so those figures include the Bill Gates audiobook at 1.25 speed, diet and exercise guides, books about the Napoleonic Wars, celebrity memoirs, and so on and so forth. It seems like a stretch to think that the average American is reading more than a novel or two a year.

And then it's very unlikely that a significant number of those readers are reading the same novel. Most novels reach relatively small audiences of a few thousand people (and those are books that sell fairly well!) Occasionally you do get a book that “breaks out” and becomes much more widely read. And then we do see lots of thinkpieces suddenly about what the runaway popularity of, say, Gone Girl, or The Hunger Games, or Fifty Shades of Gray says about our society. (Hint: they hardly ever think it says anything good.) These books tend to be edgy, risqué, with more sex or violence than was thought to be acceptable. That concerns some set of folks, even as they excite another set.

Now consider a book like Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a hundred weeks, with 12 million copies sold. An upcoming movie adaptation could help sell millions more. But I doubt we’ll get a thousand thinkpieces about the millions of freaky Crawdad fans out there, either imperiling or saving society.

But does that mean it has had no impact on all those readers?

Or is its impact just much more subtle? The novel may not move its readers into a frenzy of Congressional letter-writing to pass new anti-poaching laws, but the coming-of-age novel about a young woman overcoming trauma is clearly still moving people, personally and emotionally. With 12 million copies sold, I’d bet the novel has helped a good number of people process their own traumas a little better than before. Maybe it’s opened their eyes to things about the Deep South they’d never have known about before reading it. I’d be much more shocked if it had no impact on all those readers.

If it isn't the sort of thing that we can measure on the level of “world changing” that doesn't mean it isn't significant.

In How Fiction Works, James Woods describes a news article about a police chief in a suburb of Mexico City who assigned novels (including Don Quixote and Pedro Paramo) to all the police officers working there. He argued that reading these novels would help the police to walk in the shoes of others, to understand heroism, and to have greater sympathy for the people they serve.

Again, like with Bezos and Ishiguro, I’m concerned that the Police Chief thinks Don Quixote is a noble hero, but still—it's a delightful idea, if a bit impractical. It's hard to believe that it had a measurable impact on policing in their suburb… but if there was a local bill to require all the cops in my town to read three novels, I'd vote for it. It's hard not to think it would do some good.

But what about actual, measurable change? A scientific study in Science several years ago showed that, after reading short excerpts of literary fiction, subjects did better on a test where they had to guess the emotional state of a person based on their expression. Interestingly, the test showed no change for those who read nonfiction, and a negative effect for those reading “commercial” fiction (as an example they cited Gone Girl!). The findings seemed to suggest that reading literary fiction improves our sympathy, that is our ability to recognize the emotional states of others. The study didn't determine how long it lasted, or if a habitual reader of literary fiction showed long term improvement. But it did show some effect, even a subtle one.

Empathy, also often cited as a skill improved by reading fiction is closer to the “walk in someone’s shoes” that the Mexican police chief was seeking. It is subtly different from sympathy, in that it means we not only identify the emotions of others but feel what they feel. It's often spoken of as a potential good effect of reading fiction, though some argue that it can be negative, since it causes us to feel like we've done some good (by feeling someone else's suffering) and then demotivating us to do some real world helpful activity because we *think* we've already helped in our empathy.

This is likely correct. Many writers now are urging that novels should more directly push readers to take real world action: encouraging activism and protest, or becoming more eco-conscious, or inspired to volunteer with local aid groups.

I do worry that many readers may balk if they feel a novel is assigning them homework—I still feel like a real change is likely to occur mainly when we take it upon ourselves the way I did after reading Cat’s Cradle. I didn’t need Vonnegut to include numbers for the local Secular Humanists Group in the back, but I’m not against it either.

Even so, I don’t think we should measure a novel’s success on the amount of empathy, or activism, it inspires or doesn’t. Some may, and more power to them. But that can’t be the only measuring stick.

Novelist Louise Erdrich said, of the study in Science, “It’s nice to be told what we write is of social value. However, I would still write even if novels were useless.”

I would too. I don’t think the ends have to justify the means, when it comes to art. I think art can be anything it wants to be. It can and should be fun, tricky, sad, silly, infuriating, worrisome, nihilistic, hopeful, sweet, cruel, busy, simple, familiar, and foreign… preferably as much of this at the same time as possible. It’s only because art can make room for all these things, and anything else under the sun we want, that it keeps on evolving and thriving and finding new relevance.

Great art, I’d go so far as to say, makes everything else in life, including our annual net revenue and the latest newspaper headlines, feel like a “fucking waste of time” at least for a little while.

Furthermore, the idea of art’s usefulness as a tool of persuasion is sometimes the very thing that worries me. If I can write novels that persuade readers to think more like I do, then someone else can write them to persuade readers to think in some other way.

Put bluntly, for every Kurt Vonnegut out there, there’s an Ayn Rand, if not two. I’d happily get wish the unwriting of Hillbilly Elegy now, if it meant I never had to think about JD Vance again. Art that’s too “useful” can become just as big of a problem as the ones we wish it could solve.

Jonathan Gottschall in his 2012 book, The Storytelling Animal argued that our ability to tell and be changed by stories was crucial to our success as a species. But Gottschall has, by 2021, changed his tune dramatically. His new book, The Story Paradox, argues that, in fact, our susceptibility to storytelling might destroy us as a species. Recent years have been a reminder that politicians and leaders can also weaponize the manipulations of storytelling to convince, for instance, 20% or more of the population of QAnon conspiracies. A narrative (based on facts) about the President's collusion with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, meets a narrative (based on fantasy) about him being setup by the Deep State, and the result is that we are divided and paralyzed and unable to even agree on the reality we are all living in.

If it seems silly to think that something like a novel could save us from all this, it bears considering that other forms of storytelling (and not especially artful) are a huge part of the problem. (And why would the CIA have founded the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and created literary realism if they didn’t think it would defeat communism? I’m joking. Mostly.)

It's easy to get frustrated. Easy to wish we could do more. Easy to wish that, since you’ve got a hammer, your problems could all be nails. Easy to point fingers and say that creating “useless” art is just fiddling while Rome burns.

I feel this way all the time. And most days I still spend several hours writing.

It is helpful to remember in those moments that nothing about being a novelist precludes anyone from taking direct action. Writers can (and do!) protest, advocate, volunteer, speak out, and do good deeds. Writing novels is not, I suspect, the thing preventing any one of us from spending more time building affordable housing with Habitat For Humanity or volunteering with the Big Brothers and Sisters program.

If what we want is to do good in the world, then we can do it with more tangible and less subtle results than with our art.

And many successful novelists do use the megaphone that their art provides to motivate others to act and get involved in great causes. Grace Paley was one of the finest short story writers who ever lived, and she still found time to protest the war in Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, and so on. Her stories deftly and boldly explore these views as well. You can see this everywhere still, and I think of writers like Min Jin Lee, Mitchell S. Jackson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and NK Jemisin as just a few prominent authors whose political activism is brilliant both on the page and in the real world. The same PEN organization that bestows prestigious awards on the best literature of the year, also works tirelessly to fight inequality, book bans, censorship, the imprisonment and the oppression of authors and journalists.

And why would people censor and ban books, and imprison writers if they didn't fear that books could change the world? You don't need to issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie if you're not scared of what his books are going to do to the people you're oppressing.

Zadie Smith once wrote that she did not believe that a great novel could change a nation. But, she argued, it might just change the weather in that nation. I think this is right—the best we can do as storytellers is affect people’s awareness and mood. We might, at best, show them possible ways of changing the world. Whether they then turn that into real, tangible change is something else.

We like to cite books like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle as the kind of novel that had a real impact on society. Written in 1906, the book “exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.” But this kind of direct change resulting from a novel is historically incredibly rare. Even back then, it wasn't as if every novel (even much better novels) out there was leading directly to new government agencies and federal laws. That can’t be our expectation.

Recently, I reread the 1996 essay “Why Bother?” by writer Jonathan Franzen for the first time in over a decade. I was stunned how exactly it fit the mood I was in nearly thirty years later. I had forgotten that it begins by explaining that his “despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book.” (I just went there a few months ago, to work on one of mine.) At the time Franzen was navigating a divorce and a country preparing for war against Iraq (the first time). Feeling as if the country is “hopelessly unmoored from reality” Franzen found that even at the famous artists colony he couldn't escape the national and global mess. He wishes he could go to a monastery instead and “hide from America.”

He picked up another novel there, Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox, written thirty years before, in 1970. Reading the novel helped him. “That Fox’s book had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf — felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”

It’s a familiar feeling to many of us who love novels. Finding the perfect one for us, at the perfect time, can heal and inspire us. It can feel almost holy.

And yet, Franzen frets that the world of the 60s that Fox writes about is already ancient history. He fears his own society in 2001 is too obsessed with TV, uninterested in novels, and so what is he even doing, trying to write one? He laments that a novel like Catch-22 would no longer be able to impact society in the way Heller’s once did in an age where something like that could be a bestseller. He longs for the days when “Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another’s work” and “the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction.”

Eventually he comes to face the fact that, even in Heller’s day, the bestseller lists were usually filled with dreck and that there never was some Golden Age where everyone in America read smart books all the time and discussed them intelligently in the mainstream of our culture. Periodicals like The Smart Set, which in the Jazz Age published a young F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and many other literary names—were, even then, money-losers, propped up by sales of detective pulps like Black Mask. (Which would give us Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and many more anyway.)

Reading and writing fiction becomes, for Franzen, more isolating and depressing, as he tries to grapple with its seeming inability to solve any real problems.

The best part of Franzen’s essay comes as he delves deeper into his own motives for writing in the first place. With the help of a psychologist researching some of these same topics, he realizes that he came to love reading books as a young “social isolate” and that the imaginary worlds of Middle Earth not only helped him feel less alone at the time (being friends with Frodo and Bilbo and the gang) but also to feel less alone in real life, as he came to then connect with other readers who also loved The Lord of the Rings. Those novels with their twisting unpredictability, helped him to become more accustomed to the difficult and random nature of the real world.

But as he grew up and television and movies became more and more accepted as high culture, he felt like being a reader and a writer left him isolated again. “All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped.”

The psychologist argues that being a reader of “substantive” novels will never die out, because they give us a way to feel we, too, have “substance.” But people will also continue to find substance in lots of other things. The substance of knowing every thread within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the contestants on every season of Love Island, or the lyrics to every song ever written by Drake, or the content of every TikTok by (insert name of famous TikTok influencer here)… and just for the record, no one seems to expect all of that stuff to change the world, do they?

Just because friends and neighbors find substance in these things (often in addition to finding it in novels) does not mean they’re low-class or unsubstantial.

In fact, the opposite is true. In order for my own work to have relevance and even substance, I had better well understand what is substantive to my readers about all of those things too. Otherwise I really will be writing increasingly irrelevant stuff to an increasingly shrinking population of readers who live some bubble where these things don’t exist.

If we want to re-empower the social novel then I think step one might be to accept and understand the society we live in as something more than just a fallen state of some better world that never really existed anyway.

Isn’t that much more being “hopelessly unmoored from reality” than the other way around?

In the end, Franzen’s conclusion is that he should not expect his novel to fix all the problems of the world, that he does not need to stress out over saving the world or even the social novel—that he should just have fun and enjoy himself. And what happened?

He wrote The Corrections, one of the most impactful and influential novels of the year, if not the 21st century. Did it solve all our problems? Clearly not. But did it change the world? I think it did. It was read by the Darwins and Disraelis of our day, and by a lot of other people too. It raised the bar for what a novel could and should do in a new century. I am actually not the biggest fan of the book—I think his loathing for his own characters is simply unbearable in it—but I still respect and admire its scope and intimacy, its language, its power. I love that he could only achieve all of that when he let go of his self-imposed sense of social responsibility and just let himself enjoy writing for its own sake again.

A final thought here, on the way that a novel changes us, and in doing so makes us change the world around us. At some point in “Why Bother?” Franzen distills the purpose of fiction in a better way than I’ve seen:

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Historically, Franzen says, we’ve preferred to come to terms with the Ache through art and religion. Technology and money promise to satisfy all our desires (but don’t) and to make us the center of our own universe (but don’t). So we come back then again and again, to religion and art, which can. If that’s not useful, I don’t know what is.

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Writing Towards the Fun #32:

Honestly, I just wanted to find a way to squeeze Ethan Hawke in here somewhere above and couldn’t quite make it work, so this week I’m just going to say your homework is to watch this little clip below and write about a time when art helped you at some unexpected time in your life. Have fun!

TED Talks @TEDTalks

"Art's not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it." Watch Ethan Hawke's full talk here: t.ted.com/ANFMBW6