I’ve just finished reading T. Coraghessan Boyle’s When the Killing is Done, as well as Ian McEwan’s Solar, and found them both particularly engaging, whereupon I suddenly realized why: They’re not only “good reads” but each is also a Novel Of Ideas, henceforth, NoI. Something there is in me that loves such novels, and that misses them. Or at least, I prefer them to others that simply involve a story—however well told—for its own sake. Being “of ideas” doesn’t make something an altogether novel novel, but it feels to me like it partakes of an especially interesting genre, and one for which I’d like to invite nominations.
My questions to y’all are the following: (1) Is “NoI” a meaningful and legitimate term? And if so, then (2) What are some good examples? To my mind, to qualify as a NoI, a book has to offer more than good writing as such. It must broach one or more intellectual questions or debates that persist beyond the confines of the novel itself; thus, a true NoI, I suspect, cannot simply have as its “idea” the depiction, however complex and compelling, of personalities, events or relationships. Rather, it needs to make the reader think, and not merely about the circumstances of the novel itself.
For example, Boyle intentionally and directly raises important questions about our relationship to nature, in particular whether the killing of individual animals can be justified in pursuit of larger ecological goals, thereby engaging the issue of human responsibility for nature generally and—not least—our place in the living world. And McEwan delves, with admirable scientific literacy, into global warming and especially the prospects of mitigating it via solar energy, counterpoising such global questions with issues of profound (and comic) personal fallibility.
I’ve written more than two dozen nonfiction books but no fiction, nor am I a professional commentator on the literary efforts of others, so I’m punching way above my weight here, but it seems to me that there is an unavoidable risk whenever a work of the creative imagination is combined with overt didactic goals beyond the expression of art itself: Witness the failures of socialist realism, whether applied to painting, music, literature, or elsewhere. On the other hand, many of the towering works of 19th century literature (from Hugo and Zola to Dostoyevsky and Turgenev), which to my mind represent a novelistic high point, seem explicitly concerned with making a point or generating intellectual debate, and not simply hoping to entertain or just to portray accurately a “slice of life.”
And so, I repeat: Is the very idea of a NoI a worthwhile idea in itself, and if so, what are some good recent examples?
