What are novels for?

From “More like a lecture,” a review of Lessons, acclaimed British novelist Ian McEwan’s “overly long and self-reverential” most recent book:

At times it feels as if this is one very long in-joke by McEwan: an extended self-satire of his own writing style and preoccupations. Is McEwan, in his description of Roland’s ex-wife’s award-winning novel as “Tolstoyan in sweep … Nabokovian … in the formation of pitch-perfect sentences” a hopeful self-commentary on Lessons? Possibly. He is, in this, his most autobiographical of novels, aware that his generation of writers have less credibility than ever (“Screw the lot of them. Comfortable white men of a certain age. Their time is up,” Roland writes). McEwan is comfortable in writing this because he knows it’s not true.

Inevitably, his adoring fans in the liberal left media have fawned over the novel, with the New York Times describing his reference to events including “Chernobyl, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, the Cuban missile crisis, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, John Major, the Freedom of Information Act, 9/11, Enron, Karl Rove, Gordon Brown, Nigel Farage, Covid” as “judicious”. For that critic McEwan’s political longueurs are convenient reminders that “history is occurring”. She concludes, “maybe some readers do, in fact, require that reminder”. But do we? When did telling the reader what to think, what to believe, what to support and campaign for, become a novelist’s primary role? Why the need to teach us lessons on every page? Shouldn’t a novelist tell us stories about people?

Emphasis mine.

The reviewer, David James, continues with a quotation from Philip Roth: “politics is the great generalizer and literature is the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship with one another—they are in an antagonistic relationship.”

A trend I’ve noticed, both in the higher levels of official, paid criticism (of both books and films) and among we groundlings, especially on platforms like Goodreads: Reviews that praise a given work, often emphasizing how important it is, not because of its story or even its style or technical merits but because it features X, Y, or Z or, worse, is written by X, Y, or Z. Call it criticism by checklist. I’ve seen numerous Goodreads reviews that actually say things like, “OMG, I love the X representation!”

Okay, I always think, but how was the story?

I haven’t read Lessons—I’ve found Atonement, Saturday, and the odd but brilliantly executed Nutshell quite enough McEwan for me for the foreseeable future—so I can’t say whether or not James’s review is fair, but it is worth reading as a primer on how not to incorporate current events, didacticism, or messaging into one’s fiction. That is, how to avoid turning your novel into a series of lessons.

Connoisseurs read for technique. Bores read for the message. Fanatics read for ideological validation. For everyone else, the story—in all its particularity—must come first.