“I walk into the store. I cruise around grasping my cart as I do the remnants of my life—with desperation. I nod self-consciously to a half dozen doppelgängers who nod back as I pass by. Old men like me with bearded faces and faded dreams, inwardly tearful that life turned out the way it has. They’re good at keeping their resentments under wraps. Better than I am.”
The preceding paragraph has the stuff of a saga. Regret and yearning. There’s a past but not much of a future. It could be the start of a flashback. Or perhaps a new generation issues forth, the progeny of the family's lost sheep, a secretive sea captain last seen ferrying supplies to Chinese guerillas at the outbreak of WWII. Five hundred pages of a Bildungsroman whose defining characteristics I’ve patched together from various sources on the Internet. It’s defined as the kind of novel that shows a young protagonist's journey from childhood to adulthood at the same time it traces the character’s spiritual, moral, psychological, and social development and growth. The bildungsroman traditionally ends on a positive note, though its action may be tempered by trials and misfortunes as well as resignation and nostalgia. If the grandiose dreams of the hero’s youth are over, so are many foolish mistakes and painful disappointments.
The genre has fallen out of favor. Why? It just has—for several reasons:
- Attention span, evolving reader habits
- Page count: 80 somethings are used to longer books (sagas),
- A fascination with the dystopian,
- The favorable acceptance of eBook and audiobook versions, and yet traditional publishers and self-publishers like Amazon favor only a small subset of genres,
- The hairsplitting dissection of genres into a never-ending profusion of sub-genres,
- Subject matter.
There’s no point in lamenting, no point in trying to persuade younger generations that they should be reading Tolstoi, Dreiser, or Henry James, let alone Henry Fielding, Alexandre Dumas, or Thomas Hardy. That they might thrill to the fits and foibles of characters like Becky Sharp or Tom Jones is, for them, a non-starter. Those authors and their books are too far removed from the random access thought processes of the young. Sagas are too much like Romance novels with gout. They have a dulling effect on the quick minds of younger generations.
Where are the books from the spiritual progeny of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Fowles? They're here, all around us. They're alive and they're writing. But publishers are overwhelmed and they're only looking at certain genres.
Much better not to wonder and instead put out the call to those 60-80-year-olds who still read and are looking for books they can feel comfortable with. That’s the role of this blog: finding readers and writers who like to discover and discuss.
There is a solution; Books For 80 Somethings has found it and we will announce it in a future post...
Stay tuned.
