For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper by Ian Rankin. The tale (a stand-alone novel, not an entry in the John Rebus series) will unfold over the next three months, and Rankin will then adapt it for book publication in 2008.
Like a lot of people, I like the idea of publishing a novel in serial form. The image of a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins sweating out chapters of his latest potboiler, scrambling to end each installment on a properly suspenseful note, and handing ink-still-wet pages to an impatient typesetter has time-honored appeal. It corresponds to our romantic view of the novelist as part wandering troubadour (spinning an endless yarn and stringing along a willing audience, Scheherazade-like) and part industrial craftsman (making piece goods for a booming mass market). The idea of serialized publication also plays to the assumption that suspense is the cardinal feature of storytelling—that waiting isn’t the hardest part, it’s the best part.
The reality, however, is that waiting a week or more between stints of reading a novel is pointless. The practice of distributing long works of fiction through periodical literature has fallen into disuse, and for very good reason. When you can buy any of thousands upon thousands of novels in paperback, each for less than a ten-spot, when you can then read such a book at your own sweet pace and without interruption, why would you turn to a magazine to sate your narrative needs?
(With TV shows, by the way, it used to be that you had no choice but to “tune in next week” if you wanted to follow a sequence of episodes through to its finish. Now, thanks to the DVD revolution, you can watch an entire season of The Sopranos or Lost over the course of several evenings, much as you might march through a novel in nightly reading sessions. I’ve reached a point where the idea of watching a show when it’s first broadcast—and waiting seven days for the story to resume—has become unthinkable.)
I read the first chapter of “Doors Open,” the new Rankin serial, and it’s a decent work of stage-setting that leaves me with no inclination to buy or log on to the Times Magazine next week. Rankin writes in a stock manner (he gives one character “dark piercing eyes”), and his plotting moves along rails that many a screenwriter has greased before him. The magazine includes the serial in its Funny Pages section, so “caveat lector” applies to those who come looking for deathless prose or matchless storytelling. I just wonder: Who does come looking for a phoned-in, chopped-up narrative of this kind, and why?
A work of narrative art, as I noted previously, needs to exist as a self-contained, fully realized whole. Serial publication doesn’t prevent a novel from attaining that exalted state, once all of its parts have made their appearance. But this format does seem to compromise a work—by altering its natural flow, by converting it into a vehicle of audience-grabbing entertainment. (“What will happen next to our hero . . . ?”) Audience grabbing and entertainment are all right in their place, but novelists and novel readers also have other business to attend to.
Back in 1996, Stephen King published The Green Mile in six parts than hit bookstores at the rate of one trim volume per month. I was then working at a bookshop, and I recall the modest flurry of excitement that attended each new installment of King’s Depression-era tale. (There was something apt, I suppose, in his choosing that period for a story that followed the structure of a Saturday-afternoon movie serial.) Readers cleared out our stock of each title, month after month, and King cleaned up financially by bringing out The Green Mile twice—first in that series of little chapbooks and then in a one-volume edition. Still, however lucrative it may have been, this gimmick is not one that King has repeated.
