In the short exchange below (from 2009) with Tina Brown, Philip Roth explains why he thinks hardly anyone will be reading novels 25 years from now. It will become a cultic activity, for a very small group of people. The problem, Roth says, is not the Kindle; it's the print. Reading novels requires concentration, focus, devotion, and these are now hard to come by, given competition from the movies, TV and computers.
Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
I hope Roth is wrong about this. But I also think that he must be. Movies and TV have been around for long enough and there are still large numbers of people reading fiction. That suggests that it yields its own satisfactions, satisfactions different from those provided by screen versions of the narrative form. I wouldn't care to try and give a complete account of what these are, but speaking only for myself - and I've been an avid movie-goer and movie-watcher since I was a boy - I'd say that amongst them are the possibilities that written fiction provides through 'long slow distance': to explore things in greater depth and detail, to 'go inside' characters and what they're thinking and feeling, to play off one interior world against another, to build a situation more gradually, to accumulate 'colour' and detail more richly. I'm not saying that film is closed off from all of this, but it doesn't hold every advantage. (Via.)
