By Joseph Bentz
I love novels. I love to read them. I love to write them. I love to teach them to college students.
In an otherwise noisy life filled with work, traffic, kids’ sports practices, and distractions of every kind, I treasure the chance — however rare — to sink into my favorite recliner late at night and take a trip to a different world.
As much as I love this genre as it has existed for several centuries, I believe it is about to change in ways that will alter the writing and reading experience forever. I’m not just talking about the phasing out of paper versions of books in favor of electronic versions. I take that change as a given.
People can moan all they want about how they could never curl up with an electronic reader the way they do with their beloved books. They can rhapsodize about the smell of the pages and the comfort of having all those books surrounding them on their shelves. Sorry. Eventually almost all of us will be downloading our books onto slender readers and wondering how we ever managed to lug all those heavy books around. The question is, what will be on those readers?
An argument could be made that even before the advent of electronic books, the novel was long overdue for some changes. As a genre, it’s pretty old-fashioned. It has changed little in the last 250 years. Back in the late 18th century, the novel consisted of several hundred pages of black-and-white text. Go to any local bookstore today (assuming it hasn’t gone out of business), pick up the average novel, and that’s still what you get.
The technology has even gone backward in some ways. For instance, novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries were routinely illustrated. Not just novels for children, but for adults as well. Now illustrations in novels are rare, even though the technology would make that easier than in earlier eras.
Changes in the novel have been slow in coming, but I believe the advent of electronic books, combined with people’s changes in reading habits and attention spans, will speed up innovations in the near future. Electronic novels open up possibilities unimaginable in paper formats.
If a novel tells of a character listening to a piece of music, for example, why not include a link to a clip of that song right in the text? Something similar is already being done with Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel,
Inherent Vice. The page on which the book is sold on Amazon.com includes a playlist of the songs the main character listens to in the book. Readers can click on each selection for downloads of the songs and other information about them.
Or imagine a spy novel in which the story hinges on the interpretation of a shadowy photograph or strange symbols scribbled in a diary. Why not let readers click on a link to the photograph or diary itself? If the spy is looking at stolen government documents, let the reader click and see them too. In a crime novel, why not let the readers
see the grainy surveillance video for themselves just as the detective sees it? Why not let them
hear the cryptic voicemail message on the murder victim’s phone?
Like movies whose DVD versions include commentaries from actors and directors and behind-the-scenes glimpses into the filmmaking process, novels could include author interviews, alternate endings, non-fiction articles about topics related to the content of the novel, and many other extras.
Plenty of objections could be raised to this new vision of the novel. Extra content means extra expense, not to mention extra copyright problems in getting permissions for song clips and other material. Those things can be worked out, as Pynchon’s deal with Amazon shows.
This new novel also requires lots of extra work for the novelist. Does the writer have to now provide not only the words of the book, but also produce film clips and maps and made-up documents as well? It’s likely that writing a novel will become much more of a collaborative process between the novelist and other artists and creative people, just as writing a children’s book is already often a collaboration between a writer and artist.
Another big objection is that all these extras take too much attention off the words themselves. Part of the joy of reading a novel is losing ourselves in the story, and anything that breaks us out of that fictive dream is bad. Think of how frustrated you get when you’re absorbed in a good book and someone interrupts to ask a question.
As a writer, reader, and teacher of literature, I’m sympathetic to that argument, but many people already have trouble — or more trouble than they used to — sitting uninterrupted through hundreds of pages of black-and-white blocks of text. They fidget, look away, take breaks to glance at the TV, send a text message, send email, or do a Facebook update to announce they’re reading a novel. So if they’re going to self-interrupt anyway, why not a little break with something related to the text?
Personally, I’d be happy if none of this happened. I am happy with novels as they are. I’m not advocating any of this, but I do believe it will happen.
But for me, no matter how fancy things get or how many books I end up with on my electronic reader, nothing is going to stop me from occasionally digging out an old paper copy of one of my favorites and heading toward my favorite chair.
Joseph Bentz graduated from Olivet in 1983 and taught English at ONU from 1986 to 1991. He now teaches at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California and is author of six books. More information about his books can be found at www.josephbentz.com.
