Is Quality Fiction a Victim of Declining Attention Spans?

I’ve written several posts in the past about Young Adult (YA) fiction, not because I have any interest in it per-se, but rather because it is apparently about the only genre where sales are actually increasing. And this is at least in part because it is popular with adults as well as with the target audience. 

What is behind the trend, one wonders? Is it yet another indicator of the failure of our much maligned education system? 

Maybe not directly. A recent New York Times “Bookends” feature tackled, with only mixed success, the question: “Do we mistake inaccessibility [in literature] for brilliance?” 

In the course of attempting to answer the question, one of the respondents, novelist Zoe Heller, said readers are increasingly unwilling to tackle difficult books because technology has shortened attention spans. 

“In these focus-impaired times, we seem a lot less likely to overvalue abstruseness than to prematurely dismiss it as not worth the trouble,” Heller said. 

First television and now the Internet have increasingly conditioned people to view life as a stream of easily identifiable and digestible titbits and not, unless deeply personal (more on that in a minute), material to be dwelled upon and pondered. 

Noting that her children routinely reject books that seem dull, in part because a 12-year old girl has access to “a vast array of chatty YA-books pandering to lowest-common-denominator tween interests,” Heller noted that she herself sometimes has the same failings. 

“Even we (older folks) are not immune to the restlessness of the Internet era,” the author said. “Which explains why, when I lay down the other night to read ‘Imperium,’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski, I somehow got waylaid and wound up reading my daughter’s copy of John Green’s ‘Paper Towns’ instead.” 

The other respondent, essayist Leslie Jamison, appeared incapable or uninterested in addressing the question posed by the editors of the NYT’s weekly book review section other than to give an example of how a person can become deeply engrossed in a difficult book only when there is a perceived strong personal connection – as opposed to because of the intellectual challenge.

Jamison devoted all of the space allocated to her by discussing her attempts to come to terms with “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, a difficult book she had initially tried to read, but failed, for which she blamed herself as opposed to the author. “I feared my tastes were pedestrian at core; I was drawn to comfort foods and page turners.”

 But a few years later, she tackled “Infinite Jest” again “with a different kind of desire – because someone had told me its portrait of recovery was incredibly powerful, and I needed a powerful portrait of recovery.” Even then the book wasn’t easy, but apparently the second attempt was rewarding for Jamison if only in a way that she struggles to explain.