Video dims the novelist’s star
When I was an aspiring author at Medford High School in the 1970s, turning in quirky English essays and contributing a satirical column to the school paper, the Nobel Prize for Literature — awarded last week to British writer Kazuo Ishiguro — was my benchmark for literary achievement. Each year I kept tabs on the often-obscure candidate the Swedish Academy had adjudged to be the world’s premier writer and then recalculated my career trajectory accordingly.
If I were starting out today, however, my sights would be set in a different direction. Instead of pining for acclaim as a novelist or playwright, I’d be looking to make my mark in television, concocting worthy scripts aimed at the streaming services as well as the traditional networks. In an earlier age an abundance of mass circulation magazines and pulp fiction outlets — publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s as well as Astounding Stories and Weird Tales — offered encouragement to emerging novelists and sci-fi authors. Today, HBO, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime are the digital age equivalent.
In recent years, for example, serial dramas such as “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “Orange Is the New Black” and “Breaking Bad” — more so than by any novel or short story collection — have gripped the popular imagination. Of course, great literary works are still being created, but most authors now earn their stripes in prestigious and pricey creative writing programs — and the result, in my book, is a generic university standard prose which is heavy on descriptive passages and infuriatingly light on any convincing dialogue.
Also, unless you belong to a certain generation of literary practitioners — the likes of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth — being a writer of novels or short stories is not enough these days. The cultural marketplace dictates that every piece of prose — whether journalism or fiction — should be a potential source for a miniseries or movie. How many of us, for instance, have read a book only after seeing the film adaptation — or simply ignored the original material altogether?
Last year the literary world was thrown into a tizzy when Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan’s selection upset traditionalists and constituted the most significant recognition yet of a major shift in our cultural values.
As I see it, it’s only a matter of time before another milestone is achieved. When TV dramatists such as Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner and Jenji Kohan start showing up on Nobel Prize shortlists, then I’ll know the novel is officially dead and the times they really are a-changin’.
In the meantime, I’m hopeful that the digital universe will always contain a quiet corner devoted to the kind of print-bound stories and essays I produce. Even if they never result in a major award like the Nobel Prize.
The cultural marketplace dictates that every piece of prose — whether journalism or fiction — should be a potential source for a miniseries or movie.