I never decided to stop reading novels; I just fell out of the loop. You need to meet a few basic conditions to disappear into a story: a medium amount of patience, some free time, enough inner peace that a made-up person’s tribulations are more engrossing than your own. You need to stop worrying about the world, stop making to-do lists, stop reading nonfiction about trade wars and regular wars, stop rewatching old episodes of The West Wing with your kid in a bid to explain, over hours of whip-smart dialogue, how the political philosophy of the third way leads really slowly but directly to the coming of the fascist overlords.
Spend enough time in no fit state for fiction and it becomes your thing: someone will ask whether you’ve read The Safekeep, and rather than simply say, “Not yet,” you’ll say, “I don’t really read novels any more because, come on, that person didn’t really walk into a room. That person is imaginary.”
Then some cherished friend will persevere through your carapace of nonsense and insist that you read something. The book was Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen; the friend is my closest from university. We used to go on holiday together and read so much that I can remember what she thought of the dedication in Angela’s Ashes. I spent some time thinking Crossroads probably wasn’t for me, as there was too much God in it and too many children; that lasted about five pages. After that, I lived in Crossroads and only came out for food.
It was a huge talking point at the end of the previous century, the difference between middlebrow and highbrow. Lowbrow was obvious: short words, short sentences, raised lettering on the cover. It pleases me sometimes to tell the kids what used to count as a controversy in the old days: “Does Kylie Minogue really keep her figure with inline skating?” “Is drinking pints a feminist act?” “Would an intellectual ever read a bestseller?” This amuses me more than it does them.
Anyway, that more or less resolved when Franzen published The Corrections in 2001; here was a thinking man, no question, and yet what he’d written could not be put down. Those people who still liked to codify what counted for quality were gratified by Franzen’s sheer slowness – anything from five to 10 years between one novel and the next.
Crossroads, which some reviewers framed as the natural successor to The Corrections, appeared two decades after it, so it landed with a satisfying thud – until you get to the end, whereupon the author’s tortoise run-rate becomes an affront. If this were a middlebrow book, you’d say it ends on a cliffhanger, but because it is highbrow, we call it an ambiguity. In either case, I cannot spoil it, because I don’t know what happened, and even if I could, I wouldn’t, because I still partly live in it. It would be like vandalising my own house.
It’s the start of a trilogy, yet there isn’t even a publication date for the second part. The best anyone’s got is “within the next year or two”. I want to make some kind of official complaint – write to the author himself and ask what the hell he was doing all the way through Covid, if not writing. Making sourdough? It recalls the negligence of Hilary Mantel, leaving it eight years between Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, which I guess she would have argued was fine because the history was a matter of public record and we could find out for ourselves what happened next. It was not remotely fine.
It would feel callow to start a different novel while I wait, like getting a new cat when your old one gets run over, but then a friend said she’d started crying at the latest Elizabeth Strout, and she never cries because she’s on anti-anxiety medication. That’s all the blurb you need.
after newsletter promotion
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
