Writing on the wall
What does the novel look like in 2025
Along with other forms (poetry!!!!!), the novel is over. It’s a big shame. I am faced with the gruesome task of writing one in a year. How and why am I committing myself to a creative project which has failed to touch the culture at large since before my lifetime? Why do I still believe in the written long-form narrative despite its ostracisation from the mainstream in favour of television, film and, of course, x.com, which is its own kind of artwork?
We all know why the novel is over and will never work again in its recognisable form. Nobody cares to read a novel unless they’re an esoteric baddie and have retained some semblance of an attention span. The novel worked when women had time to sit around and read about domestic life, and then it worked marvellously when it was teased out of its boring shell by the modernists back before film took off. If one were tasked to point at the artworks that have touched culture over the past couple decades, they couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Succession or Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO before any book by Zadie Smith.
The novel simply does not meet the needs, nor does it speak to, the conditions of the current cultural moment!! Nobody has the time nor the wherewithal. It is too difficult to concentrate. It does not thrill us visually like film, TV and x.com. It does not appeal to our fascination with confused and disjointed temporalities. It does not chop and change between horror and humour like x.com. And so, the failure of its medium is the failure of its content. If the novel can not move formally with the times then new ones will fail to exist entirely (or those that matter, at least). The only novels read will be the old favourites of esoteric baddies and male manipulators.
Sure, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Miss Rooney’s books are flying off the shelves, but then Miss Rooney is doing something others aren’t. Conversations with Friends is, if nothing else, an exploration of communication via the internet and instant messaging. Frances looks back over old text messages with Bobbi and relives their chats, blurring the usual forward movement of conversation. Intermezzo, incidentally, sees Rooney’s prose take on a modernist bent. And so Rooney takes snippets of the cultural moment (feet pics, incels, age-gap relationship discourse) and pairs it with her stream of consciousness in a successful novel that people actually want to read.
But Miss Rooney is an anomaly. She has captured something of the flurried, lapsed concentration that plagues her fellow millennials and gets even worse by gen z. The modernists reacted to WWI and technological advancement and grappled with the idea of the self in the wake of mass atrocity. We are reacting to war in real time over phone screens and grappling with wanting to kms. The modernist project really isn’t over.
How can we possibly and wholly distill mental passivity and brainrot in a medium that requires such concentration to get through? We still love TV and film, and so we’re still invested in long-form narratives. But how can we capture the multi-screen mode of our visual planes? Is it possible to write a novel that you can read while you watch something else? Is it possible to read a novel that you can skip through when you get bored and land on a brand new, tantalising section? Can you scroll through a novel? Can we, and should we, be using the language we have now to describe the conditions we’re under now? Should we still be trying to ‘make it new’, as my favourite fascist Ezra Pound so wisely said of the Imagists?
As someone who has now committed herself to a dying form, I’m weighed under by these questions. How can I possibly make the novel matter??? It’s certainly too late to retreat back into what I know. Maybe I just need to be comforted by the idea that if they made it new before, we can do it once more. But whether it will actually be a novel or not is a whole other question. We don’t quite have the language.
- I 6 July 2025