Save Your Attention Span, Read a Novel
3 suggestions about what to read next.
In magazines, newspapers, opinion pages, and on social media, writers agree: fewer people -- and particularly fewer men -- are reading novels. Public opinion surveys show a decline in reading. The obvious culprit is the smartphone, which has ruined attention spans. Indeed, whenever I ride public transportation, around 60 to 70 percent of riders seem absorbed in their phones, scrolling through videos and typing text messages. But the decline of reading fiction is not a fate: we have choices about how to spend time. Recently, I decided to bring along my Kindle as much as possible when I ride the subway, and I am somewhat less successfully weaning myself from checking email on my laptop.Â
With very few exceptions, fiction writers now are not celebrities like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer were; they are known to people who read newspapers and magazines like The New York Times and The Atlantic, where the debates over the decline of fiction take place. But novelists still do good work. It is not the case that novels were better in the past than in the present -- as if that's even a thing that one could say authoritatively. Given the change of the times, I want to share with readers three novelists who do interesting work.
Serhiy Zhadan. Zhadan is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and rock and roll star who has served near the frontlines. His books include Mesopotamia and Voroshilovgrad, both set in his native Eastern Ukraine. I recently finished Voroshilovgrad (2010), which is a surreal road novel about a man going to take over his missing brother's gas station in the Ukrainian city of Luhansk, which during the Soviet Union was known as Voroshilovgrad. The protagonist, Herman, encounters nomadic Mongols, smugglers, and aging football players and goes to a wedding and a funeral on his way back to Luhansk. Writing in Ukrainian, Zhadan's language is vivid, with sentences like this: "Whoever we are, we're always moving along our own routes, finding ourselves in foreign lands, reaching beyond the curtains of our own experience; everyone we meet along the way remains in our memory, their every word and every touch."
Olga Tokarczuk. Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, and her books are intricate. For example, The Books of Jacob is a 912-page novel about a Polish Jew who claims to be the second coming of Jesus; the novel's pages are numbered in descending rather than ascending order in a nod to Hebrew. It's tough to get through. But I recently read her 2022 novel The Empusium, which takes place in 1913 at a sanitorium for men with tuberculosis, similar to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. As with Magic Mountain, The Empusium has a lot of ideas, but there are also mystery and horror elements like an Agatha Christie novel or The Shining: a dead body is discovered at the beginning of the protagonist's stay at this isolated resort, and then everything goes south. Â
Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart is the rare novelist to make big money today, and his novels are very funny. He has a great eye for attention to detail in satire. For example, his novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) takes place in the near future in the U.S. as it is collapsing amid China's rise, and everyone uses a social media site called GlobalTeens to communicate. The catchline for the Facebook-like site is "Less words = more fun!!!" The characters exchange love letters in instant-messaging and text speak that is just a shade more absurd than contemporary messaging. Shteyngart also wrote an observant and funny novel about the pandemic, Our Country Friends (2021), which was remarkable considering that the isolation and dread of the lockdowns would seem to be a terrible setting for a work of fiction.
Earlier this year, the MSNBC host and writer Chris Hayes published a book called The Sirens' Call arguing that our attention spans have become a commodity seized and controlled by corporations for profit. Hayes wrote that we have become alienated from our attention, making a comparison with the economist Karl Marx, who made a similar famous argument about alienation and labor in a capitalist society. In reading a novel, we have nothing to lose but our chains.
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