Did "The Sopranos" succeed at the expense of novelists?

Brits opening up the Guardian’s book pages today will find an interesting piece by John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, about the decline of American culture and the displacement of books by other forms of media.

Certainly not a new subject for an essay, of course, but this time the argument is framed in response to the enormous success of HBO’s "The Sopranos." The series, Freeman writes, has been praised in lavish terms once reserved for novels, and its creator, David Chase, has been called "the Dickens of our time." This troubles him. He writes that readers are being stolen by a medium that "does the imagining; our eyes need only follow." Too many things compete for the public’s attention, he argues (rightly), and the time required to revel in a novelist’s vision just doesn’t fit into most people’s calendars anymore. So it’s no wonder that the series captivated many people who once would have spent their evenings reading Philip Roth or Norman Mailer.

Even though much is familiar in these arguments, I don’t mind reading another lament over the state of American readership; in fact, I agree with Freeman (who has written for us on occasion) on several points: How often have I heard people say they just don’t have time to read books and, what’s more, don’t care? But "The Sopranos" is hardly in the same category as TV entertainment that creates easy images and does the thinking for mindless viewers. Freeman doesn’t exactly say that, but he blurs the distinctions. The widespread debate over the meaning of the show’s final scene, of course, won’t be resolved anytime soon (unless Chase has mercy on us all and one day explains what he had in mind). Throughout the series, there are elusive scenes that prompt a "What just happened?" response and an analytical effort--worthy of Harold Bloom--to figure it out. Freeman writes that "the screen is destroying the page"; I understand why he believes this, and I feel somewhat the same way--but then I remember all those dreadful three-decker novels that stole readership from the Victorian greats, who managed to survive nonetheless.

Freeman’s piece is wonderfully insightful on why "The Sopranos" appealed to so many of us. Check it out. His evaluation is one more indication that Chase has raised the bar on storytelling and reminded writers that they can’t take their audiences for granted.

Nick Owchar

Comments

[Thomas McGonigle]

We have heard this lament of course before. The Sopranos at least in this household took us back to The Godfather movies and the inferiority of the Soprones is so clear to see. And as to this TV show killing the novel... why not think of the novel as really and truly dead. If we are to think that writers like Denis Johnson, Jonathan Fanzen and Ha JIn are going to ever write something that is really of interest or have actually written something of interest than I am glad to no longer think of myself as a fiction writer...Having picked up advanced copies of Ha JIn and Denis Johnson at BEA it is probably, as Anthony Burgess said, an insult to the imagination if one couldn't write the reviews now after having read one page of each of these novels that are already only corpses awaiting burial. If anyone wants to read real writing: read the six pages of a short piece of writing The Great Christmas Killing and then the four pages of Liar, Cheater by Peter Nadas in his soon to be published FIRE AND KNOWLEDGE...the moral severity, the clarity of the thinking, the precise imagining... whenever I hear this litany of Mailer, Franzen, Delillo etc etc I think of Edward Dahlberg's simple comment: our well know bad writers to hear of them is sufficient.

[eda]

This article, predicated upon brash and ridiculous generalizations ("white-wine sipping yuppies," "a gutter growl leavened (and toughened) by ethnic self-consciousness") and other flimsy supportive evidence, is the kind of "filed at the eleventh hour" nonsense that I really can't see you, Nick, taking seriously. There is little here in the way of specific correlative examples between the supposed death of literature and the rise of television. Further, what's not to suggest that the two mediums can't exist in some kind of Gould-like non-overlapping magisteria? Television isn't exactly a new medium and the novel has continued to endure, despite the boob tube's ostensible sullies upon American culture. If David Chase's contributions cause Americans to demand more of narratives -- no matter what the form -- how then is this an evil thing? Citing a study from three years ago fails completely to take into account what is currently happening in literature. If the novel is not something being talked about, why then are numerous bookstores and kids going crazy over the latest Harry Potter volume?

This article is hysterical poppycock of the first order.

[rob platt]

Modern novels tend to be so irrelevant, so no wonder so few people read. I frankly don't think Mailer or Roth plumbs our moral dilemmas as well as David Chase does. Updike et al are pretty much self-obsession, and none of these authors think they should deign to write plots that draw the reader in. There's nothing out there like Catch-22 or Eudora Welty or (my favorite) Palisades' own Maritta Woff, and nothing entertains like Chandler.

Many people think the best writer today is pulp god James Ellroy, and frankly I agree. He works his ass off for the reader. He transports you to another world, not only giving you a hallucination of the past, but also putting you right inside the moral choices his characters make.

If Sopranos inspires dinner table conversations over the ethics of crime vs the ethics of bad government or hypocrisy, and how we all serve two masters, then Chase has done his job and Bravo.

[rob]

I need to correct my earlier post. I meant to mention Maritta WOLFF, not Maritta Woff. Recently Scribner published Sudden Rain, her last novel, which lay unpublished for 40 years, in an unplugged refrigerator in her garage, and was only posthumously brought out. Her first novel, Whistle Stop, was an undergraduate thesis at Michigan. Her writing seems relevant and compelling, and draws me in as other writing just doesn't do. Perhaps its the untutored artlessness.