Sopranos: The Novel

Has the novel been murdered by the mob?
Brilliant though it was, The Sopranos moved in to a place in US culture that used to belong to prose fiction. John Freeman wonders whether they have killed it off foreverThursday July 5, 2007
Guardian UnlimitedFor the last month, a deep, almost mournful, silence has hovered over New York publishing circles. After eight years and 86 episodes, The Sopranos is finished. No longer will it be acceptable to veer mid-conversation from Don DeLillo into David Chase's fictional New Jersey, where Cadillac-driving mobsters hack at each other with Homeric style. No more will we speculate on where Carmela Soprano buys her teal pantsuits.
From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?
This question is not as facetious as it might at first seem. Novelists from Norman Mailer to Gary Shteyngart have described the show - which as yet does not exist between two covers - as a Great American Novel, and for good reason. Spread across nearly 100 hours of viewing time, The Sopranos developed characters to a degree unparalleled in American television, save that other current HBO drama, The Wire, which is, in fact, occasionally written by a novelist, George Pelecanos.
The Sopranos also covered some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel. Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, it explored the ways in which each new generation attempts to fix the parenting mistakes of the one before; like John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, it hitched its star to the emotionally complicated but intellectually unsophisticated inner life of an unreconstructed American man; and like Philip Roth's American Pastoral, it depicted the death of an American city, revealing the rupture between classes (and races) around its grave.
But most of all it told this story in a deeply American language: a gutter growl leavened (and toughened) by ethnic self-consciousness, embittered by money's inability to make one belong. In a funk, Tony turns to psychotherapy to repair the psychic breach created for him by living beyond his background, only to carom out. Freud's narratives mean nothing to him when compared to those of Francis Ford Coppola. "To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one," the critic Leslie Fielder wrote, "since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history."
America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood (and the White House press room), so the ascendancy of The Sopranos to the level of quasi-literary art should have been expected. Indeed, this wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature - which they define as just one novel, story or play per year - and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.
In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy. Also in America, to a far greater degree than in Britain, the corporation and the language of advertising reigns supreme. To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people's outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language. It is a syntax, as Wallace put it in his 1996 Infinite Jest, geared around what "all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase".