Have you noticed, for the most part, reading in America has become a feminine trait? Unless you count Tom Clancy or a sports book with lots of pictures, men don’t read. Women are mocked for joining Oprah’s Book Club. The implication is men are too busy for such frivolity. Of course, men are never too busy to watch every football game on their 52-inch TVs, even the third-rate offerings on Thursday nights. But somehow even the viewing of sports seems visceral to men while reading is kind of passive.
Since by and far men still control life in America, good books have fallen into disrepute. There are still novelists writing good books, but hardly anyone reads them. The great philosophical question of our time is if someone writes a great novel and nobody reads it, does it really exist? For all intents and purposes, American literature has ceased to exist.
I offer as proof The New York Times bestseller list, which can always reliably be counted on to include potboilers by James Patterson and Stephen King and a few self-help books, at least one touting the latest diet craze (how I lost 60 pounds eating nothing but strawberry shortcake). If you want to write a best seller, forget about illuminating the human condition, we’re more interested in losing weight. What you will rarely find on any bestseller list is literature and, when you do, you can be certain manly men are totally ignorant of its existence.
It wasn’t always this way. When Ernest Hemingway was writing his great novels, he was the quintessential man’s man. He wrote about courage, hunting big game, love among the bullfights — all considered masculine subjects. We had these great American literary giants from the 1920s through the ’50s — Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner. They were not only commanding figures in literature, but also celebrities in their day. In the America of the 21st century we have replaced the celebrity of Hemingway with Kevin Federline. Back then you didn’t have to be a librarian or a professor of American Lit to read "A Farwell to Arms" or "The Great Gatsby." By contrast, how many Americans have heard of Dom DeLillo? DeLillo wrote what The New York Times called the greatest American novel of the last 25 years, "Underworld," but few Americans have ever heard of it, and even less have actually read it.
All but the prestige publishing houses stay away from literature. With the cost of putting out books soaring, the average publishing house wants guarantees it will move off the shelves. They would rather publish a book on how to improve your golf game than the great American novel. Some believe the age of Internet self-publishing will bring back the great novel, but in my experience no one reads self-published books except the author himself and his closest friends (forced at gunpoint).
You can obtain further proof of the demise of American literature by walking to your neighborhood library. The fiction section is dominated by crime, horror and romance. There are more books on the library shelf by Danielle Steel or Patterson than by John Updike. The literature is usually confined to a small area where you can find the classics gathering dust, unless some teacher assigned one for homework (that’s when you hunt for the CliffsNotes or worse the movie version).
If you can’t expect a young adult to find our great books while browsing the shelves of the local library, then you realize why literature — like opera — has become a hobby for elites.
Walk around South Philadelphia and tell me how many bookstores you come upon. Even the large chains like Barnes & Noble or Borders in Center City have taken to devoting half their stores to movies and music. Another 25 percent contains a caf�. The books are becoming more and more of an afterthought.
Reading requires more serious effort than TV. In order to read a good book, you have to engage your intellect and imagination. You can’t sleep in front of it or aimlessly change channels. The books that are read we call "page turners." It used to be the quick, easy read was what you took to the beach, but now the page turner is all we read. Life is a beach, at least in our reading life.
Does it matter if we don’t read good books anymore? Those who can’t or won’t read usually can’t write a simple sentence nor spell. So now we have an army of youths, who are the most educated generation in American history, but they can’t read, write nor spell, and they are all heading for college.
But they sure can play video games.
