I’ve been thinking on and off all week about Zadie Smith’s article, “The Essay v The Novel,” in last Saturday’s Guardian. Basically, Smith talks about her new book of essays, and how more and more fiction writers are turning away from the novel and towards more “realistic” forms — Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe, Michael Clabon, to name a few.  “The novel is dead,” they say.  To which I reply, “Oh no.  Not again.”  To those of us who have been around the stacks a few times, this is very old news.  Literary critics have been whipping themselves up into a frenzy over this declaration for generations and, I suppose, inevitably it’s time to do it once again.  But I’m not buying it.

Plenty of people are still writing novels.  Plenty more are still buying them in one form or another — regardless of what the publishing industry proclaims.  I do believe that one of the key differentiations that can be made between humans and other animals is that humans tell stories.  There is an innate need for we humans to look around and outside of ourselves and create narratives of what we see.  It is how we understand the world.  It is how we dare to continue on in the face of the adversity which has always surrounded us.  As long as we have our imaginations, we will create stories.  And as long as we create stories, we will write novels.  Of that I am sure.

But there is a different question which has been worrying me for a long time now, and which Smith also mentions in her article, namely the death of the imagination.  Now this is really something worth worrying about.  What does it say about man at the beginning of this new century that we have either lost the ability or the will to imagine?  Look at what we watch on television: reality programs.  It started with “Big Brother” and moved swiftly on from there.  And who have been the predominant winners of Best Actor/Actress Awards of late?  Actors recreating “real” people — Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Truman Capote, Harvey Milk, June Carter, Edith Piaf, The Queen.  Where are the people who dare to create characters, either through their actions or their words, out of whole cloth, out of their imagination?  What does it mean if we are all now too frightened to have our lives changed by people who have never, really, existed?

As long as there are people using their imaginations, there will be stories created.  Maybe these stories will be told by illiterate bards, like Homer, who use formulas to trigger their memories as they travel from city to city.  Maybe these stories will be told in song.  Or maybe they will be written down in versions varying from 1,000 to 100,000 words.  The form of the story telling is not the point, as far as I’m concerned.  As a novelist, this so-called death of the novel does not frighten me.  But a collective death of the imagination?  Now that, in reality, is what’s truly frightening.