Am I writing novels of ideas?

It's taken me a while to say yes

(This is not any kind of thorough analysis of my genre but random impressions off the top of my head.)

In most novels, what predominates are actions, situations, and the characters’ motives — usually with plenty of tension and conflict. The reader makes connections between these three elements and responds to the story.

In a novel of ideas, what predominates are the statements that characters utter and the debates and other discussions and dialogues that they engage in as they explore perspectives of the world. Often, the characters are on quests for psychological and spiritual fulfillment.

To the extent this is an accurate description, I am writing novels of ideas. It’s taken me a considerable time to realize this. Here are my first wisps of thinking on the topic:

Novels of ideas are a subgenre of the genre of philosophical fiction, because some novels of ideas explore topics addressed by philosophers — like free will, the purpose of life, human motives, ethics, morals, reason, the arts, and other aspects of human experience.

However, psychological and spiritual fulfillment don’t require an approach from philosophy.

Ideally, in my view, a novel of ideas should go beyond being a meditation and never descend into an ideology or even a thesis. And while a plot with conflict may be secondary, it should not, in my view, be weak.

This is my experience reading the novels of Platonist philosopher Iris Murdoch, whom I highly esteem as a thinker. I’ve read them all and I find her novels too flat.

I get clearer when I set aside dystopian, utopian, and sci fi novels as well as novels of political ideas (the libertarian Ayn Rand, the Marxist Samuel Beckett). That leaves us with what we might call pure novels of ideas.

Here we find novels that explore metaphysical ideas (Jorge Luis Borges).

And novels of ideas about the arts and identity (Marcel Proust), mystical ideas (Robert Pirsig and Milan Kundera), and cultural ideas (Thomas Mann).

I read all of these writers in my twenties and again in my forties, and while none was quite my cup of tea, they’ve all influenced me.

And then I turn to two of my favorite writers, Aldous Huxley and David Foster Wallace.

Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point — where the characters are nothing but mouthpieces for ideas — and Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest (which remains the most important literary work from a writer of my generation) are leading novels in this genre.

Huxley can be seen as pushing back against shallowness in the Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s and Wallace against shallowness in the Postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s. Both pushed back actively and consciously. They imparted the habits involved in thinking deeply.

However, while their novels have influenced me, I prefer the nonfiction of both writers.

(At some point, I’ll write a Substack post about Wallace.)

I also prefer the nonfiction of G.K. Chesterton, although the man wrote 80 books, so who’s to say for sure what his best works were? Chesterton is an inexhaustible source of brilliant insights into the human experience, and I ought to give some of his novels another try. I expect Chesterton’s influence on me to keep growing until my last day on Earth.

(There’s only one widely-praised work of fiction in this genre that I’ve not yet read — Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer — and I’ll read it in coming weeks.)

Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection and Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment are classics in the genre. I went through two Tolstoy phases and two Dostoevsky phases in my reading life, and I still profoundly admire both men, but I don’t expect I’ll be reading any of their fiction again.

Who, then, has most influenced me? Well, there’s The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. One of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films. A perfect novel, in my view. (I’ll write more about it sometime.)

And ultimately, the “novelist of ideas” who’s most influenced me is Hermann Hesse. If you’d asked me in my twenties, thirties, or forties who my favorite novelist was, I would have instantly answered “Hesse”. (I’ll have to devote a future Substack post to him, as well.)

Steppenwolf, Demian, The Glass Bead Game, and especially Narcissus and Goldmund — in my twenties I read these four novels over and over, and they shaped my sense of what a novel can be and what it can do. Now that I know that all of Hesse’s novels are regarded as novels of ideas, and now that I know I’m writing novels of ideas, my affinity with Hesse goes even deeper.