It reads so much
fiction that hundreds of magazines and dozens of publishers live
by nothing else. It reads so much fiction that public libraries
have to bait their serious books with novels in order to get them
read. It is so avid for fiction that the trades whose business it
is to cultivate public favor, journalism and advertising, use
almost as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or an
interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has character, background,
and a plot precisely like a short story. Its climax is carefully
prepared for in the best manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is
rigorously subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest
of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half narrative and
half familiar dialogue. Household goods are sold by anecdotes,
ready-made clothes figure in episodes illustrated by short-story
artists, and novelettes, distributed free, conduct us through an
interesting fiction to the grand climax, where all plot
complexities are untangled by the installation of an automatic
water-heater. I am not criticizing the tendency--it has made the
pursuit of material comfort easier and more interesting,--but what
a light it throws upon our mania for reading stories!
Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends.
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