The Modern Library

Начало книги

Books such as this often come with a daunting or gloomy introduction in which the condition of the novel is put under a microscope. Is the novel read? Is the novel dead? Has anything worthy been written since Austen, Dickens, Melville, Joyce? How can the novel compete with satellite and cable television, video, films, CD roms, the internet, sport, rock music and other forms of what is known as mass culture? We live today, in the famously miserable words of the American critic Harold Bloom, in the ‘Age of Resentment’ in which ‘devoted and solitary readers are now necessarily beleaguered’: culture is in irretrievable decline, the romance of reading gone for ever. We think otherwise. Merchants of cultural doom are hostile to change. We are not: we embrace it, were brought up with it, wallow in it rather, fighting political correctness with one paw, and gloomy ideologies with the other.

For the novel survives and flourishes: there are more bookshops than ever before, and wider choice; late twentieth-century marketing methods have been skilfully used by publishers; novels continue to be a source for film, television and the theatre. As anyone who has worked in the business of publishing, or who has been published, however fretfully, knows, the second fifty years of this century — the years we two have lived through — have been a period as sublime and exciting as any other for the novel. The mass market paperback came into its own during these fifty years. Books have benefited from a revolution in publishing and printing and selling methods; the computer has waved a magic wand over most publishing processes; authors have more rights, and many, if still too few, earn more money.

Читать дальше →