Dear Novelists, Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell

That is the request of Dwight Gardner of the New York Times. If novelists want to be more relevant and keep book publishing from failing, write more than one novel every decade.

From the piece...

Distressingly, this kind of long gestation period is pretty typical for America’s corps of young, elite celebrity novelists. Jonathan Franzen took nine years to follow “The Corrections” (2001) with his next novel, “Freedom” (2010), and “The Corrections” itself was nine years in the making. Donna Tartt vanished for a decade between “The Secret History” (1992) and “The Little Friend” (2002); at this pace we’re due for a fat new Tarttlet next fall. Michael Chabon has gone seven years between major novels. David Foster Wallace was still working on his follow-up to “Infinite Jest” (1995) when he died in 2008, though in between he published excellent books of nonfiction and stories.

Obviously, some of this is about personal style. There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace. We roll our eyes at how seldom Time magazine puts writers on its cover — it once did so quite often — and sense this is evidence of the public’s shrinking appetite for quality literature. Perhaps it has got more to do with our novelists’ lagging output, their eroded willingness to be central to the cultural conversation.

Take, as a counterpoint, Saul Bellow, who over 11 industrious years delivered four novels, several of them among the 20th century’s best: “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953); “Seize the Day” (1956); “Henderson the Rain King” (1959); and “Herzog” (1964). Bellow snatched control, with piratical confidence and a throbbing id, of American literature’s hive mind. “We are always looking,” he once said, “for the book it is necessary to read next.” For this vivifying span, the book to read next was nearly always one of Bellow’s own.

Bellow could have spent those 11 years differently. He might have toiled on a “grander” book, let’s say a slablike “Augie March.” This hurts my head to ponder.