The MagazineThe Cocktail-Party TestJoseph Bottum: Who now reads?Oct 31, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 07
• By JOSEPH BOTTUM
 "I don’t read fiction,” Billy Hunter proudly told sports reporters this month. “I only read stuff I can learn something from.” What a line, from the head of the NBA Players Association. It’s the kind of thing I used to treasure—except that I’ve begun to realize just how often I hear something similar. “I think of myself as a true reader,” a political activist told me the other day, but it turns out she meant only that she follows a few mystery writers and reads a lot of new books about politics.  As well she ought. Don’t get me wrong—plenty of first-rate nonfiction has been published in recent decades. Plenty of good fiction, as far as that goes. And yet, somehow, novels have disappeared from public-intellectual life. You can read them if you want, but you don’t have to read them to participate in the serious public discourse of America. A friend uses what he calls the cocktail-party test for a new book: Would you be embarrassed to show up at a get-together of writers and public-intellectual types without having read it? And the last novel he can remember for which that was true was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities—from 1987. Almost 25 years without a public novel, in other words. The modernist novel defined itself with the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 and the completion of Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu in 1927. It found a last peak with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus in 1947 and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952. By the time Thomas Pynchon brought out Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, the whole project was clearly coming to an end. And that was pretty much it—not just for the modernists but for the whole idea of the novel. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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