Every few years, there is a variation of this debate that is typically started by a musician or tech entrepreneur who claims that only nonfiction teaches valuable lessons and that fiction is a waste of time. It happened again recently, and the response online followed a familiar rhythm — outrage, a flurry of counterexamples, and then, eventually, a quieter question underneath all the noise. Can a novel actually do anything? Change a law, a mind, a country?
History offers a small number of genuinely dramatic yes-answers. Everyone starts with Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel about the meatpacking industry, and for good reason—public outcry over the book’s graphic portrayal of factory conditions helped pass federal food safety legislation in a matter of months. It’s tempting to want more stories like that one. It’s also important to note how uncommon it is. Holding every book to that standard would be like grading a poem for its plumbing advice because most novels, even great ones, never come close to producing a traceable policy outcome.
What appears to be more prevalent—and perhaps more fascinating—is a more subdued type of change occurring within individual readers, which is more difficult to quantify but still significant. According to a widely cited study that was published in the journal Science, individuals who read brief passages of literary fiction outperformed a comparison group that read more plot-driven commercial fiction in terms of their ability to read emotional expressions on strangers’ faces. It’s a modest finding, limited in scope, and it’s still unclear how long that effect lasts or whether habitual readers build it into something more permanent. However, it does imply that there is more going on in the brain than just the bestseller chart.
Think about how the content of a runaway hit affects how it is discussed. Books with content that is taboo or controversial tend to spark think pieces almost immediately; these are typically anxious ones that question the social implications of the books’ popularity. Seldom does a more subdued phenomenon like Where the Crawdads Sing, which sold tens of millions of copies and spent well over a hundred weeks on bestseller lists, receive the same nervous attention. It’s simple to assume that nothing changed. It’s possible the opposite is closer to true — that a coming-of-age story about trauma and isolation, read by that many people, shifted something quiet and personal in a huge number of living rooms, just without producing a single congressional hearing.
The desire for fiction to be “useful” in some quantifiable way carries a real tension. Louise Erdrich, a novelist, once remarked, somewhat amused, that she would continue to write fiction even if it proved to have no quantifiable social value. It feels like a crucial instinct. When art is evaluated solely on the basis of its ability to persuade, less admirable books can claim the same justification. For example, a book that improves one reader’s empathy may be placed on the same shelf as one that negatively alters another reader’s complaints.
In the 1990s, novelist Jonathan Franzen struggled with this same hopelessness, believing the social novel had lost its ability to educate a country the way Dickens once appeared to. Eventually, he let go of that burden and went on to write The Corrections, a book that helped define what modern fiction could sound like for a whole generation. Whether that counts as “changing the world” is a matter of scale and patience. It didn’t pass a law. It’s hard not to notice, though, how many writers and readers still point to it as a hinge moment in how American fiction thinks about family, failure, and ordinary unhappiness.
In a more humble way than most, Zadie Smith stated that while a great novel may not be able to completely transform a country, it may alter its internal climate by altering awareness and mood in ways that may or may not eventually lead to action. That seems more realistic than either extreme—the Gallagher-style rejection of fiction as made-up nonsense, or the opposite fantasy that a single book could save a democracy. Seldom do novels directly move mountains. Instead, one reader and one Tuesday afternoon at a time, they tend to quietly move the people who might eventually move the mountain themselves.
