Like many other privileged people, I learned to read before I was five, and have hardly stopped reading since. That was the way things were in that long-ago pre-TV world, when we children read fiction mainly per courtesy of writers like Enid Blyton and Mary Grant Bruce, who had not then come under a cloud of anachronistic criticism.
I was at university when I first heard of the so-called death of the novel, and was frightened by the thought. But I’ve since heard the phrase many times during the ensuing decades, and am cheered by the fact that so far the novel has clung to life, albeit precariously, while novelists persist in writing, despite the many drawbacks attendant upon the practice.
But there is growing worry about the decline in reading: a recent study confirms the fact that women read more than men, but that time spent on reading has declined for both. Time spent watching television, however, is increasing, and these trends have been evident for years now. During a de-cluttering session recently, I came across a transcript of a conversation between erstwhile President Obama and deeply Christian award-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson. It was conducted in 2015, during those almost halcyon days before President Trump, that famous non-reader. Obama and Robinson talked of many things: the state of the American nation, the nature of democracy, the divisions in modern society, the concept of freedom, and the dangers of fear.
At one point in the conversation, Obama asked Robinson whether she worried about people not reading novels anymore. She replied that the matter was not really one of her concerns, because she associated mainly with writers and readers. Obama, who has always found time to read (how?) then remarked that the ‘most important stuff’ he has ever learned came from novels; he went on to make the connection between the reading of novels and the concept of empathy. An obvious connection when you think about it, because novels are about imagined people living in places other than your own: thus they enable you, at best, to experience other minds and the inner lives of others, to imagine what it is like to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins, as the nineteenth-century American poet Mary Torrans Lathrap put it. Nearer to our own time, novelist William Boyd says succinctly: ‘If you want to know what makes people tick, read a novel.’
Robinson had mentioned