Saturday September 26, 2009

Are DVDs the real e-books?

A lot of discussion about e-books centers around pieces of hardware—like the Kindle—that offer new ways to deliver old narrative. While these delivery systems will obviously alter narrative conventions—there’s nothing narratively inevitable about 80,000 words; it’s a convenient amount of paper to carry around—enough attention isn’t being paid to the possibility (grim for me and other writers) that old narrative is already dead, not because it didn’t work, but because it has been replaced.

I think non-fiction and documentary films have already supplanted certain kinds of naturalistic fiction—and even some kinds of fantastic fiction. Would you need to write The Jungle in a world that already has Who Killed the Electric Car? What would Edgar Allen Poe have found to write about in a world where Intervention and Hoarders air back to back? (Think I’m exaggerating? Meet Sonia and Julia.) Word fans—and I am one—will scream that there are stories only words can tell, and that might be true. But which ones are they, and is it changing?

Lately, I’ve been enjoying this great story. It has dozens of compelling characters and exhibits an incredible attention to detail. It’s a commentary on society with leitmotifs of greed, desperation, and hope. I take in a few chapters at a time, put it down, then pick it back up later. I’m almost to the conclusion, and I’m kind of bummed about it. The story is so good, I don’t want it to end.

I’m not talking about a novel, which functions in one’s life exactly like this. I’m talking about The Wire. The advent of DVDs, DVRs, and video-on-demand has allowed episodic TV to compete with books like never before. Looking back, it was silly to think that something like Bonanza or Quincy could pose an artistic threat to book-length fiction. It might lure away the more distractable members of the audience, but for texture and narrative complexity, it was no contest. Now TV has come for the rest of us. Freed from the one hour (and even the two hour) frame—and from the idea that audience members might have missed episodes—TV is undergoing a renaissance and fulfilling its full promise. (Paddy Chayefsky, in the medium’s first decade, believed TV was uniquely suited for detailed, naturalistic drama, and it has only taken a half century for him to be right again.)

The other day, I asked Alexandra why anyone would write a naturalistic novel about the urban drug trade after The Wire. Her (completely correct) answer was: interiority. Then last night we saw The Informant! So much for that.