18 June 2025

If literature is dead, at least the funeral is well attended

And Dostoevsky is here too!

NS WINE CLUB — Illustration by Charlotte Trounce

Saturday morning, I am sitting on a temporary stage in a church in leafy, coastal, suburban Dublin – a kind of Hampstead-on-Sea – with the New Yorker literary critic Merve Emre (brag). We are trying to answer a question posed by the schedule: why does Gen-Z dig Dostoevsky? I wasn’t aware of this Russo-rennaissance until asked to discuss it a few weeks ago. But what the hell, sure!

I am precisely four months too old to count as Gen-Z but I know enough about Dostoevsky to say this: if he really is this generation’s literary lodestar, is it any wonder they are all so morbid and reclusive? There are a few of them in the audience to help us get to the bottom of that. And the other question Russian literature invariably asks: could we all just lighten up a bit?

We are at Dalkey Book Festival, an inky Glastonbury for the Irish cognoscenti, where the long arm of the 20th century New York salon meets the mannered sensibilities of the Hiberno-elite. Speakers are of the type you might expect – at one point an Icelandic poet asks me over a glass of wine in the green room if everyone here but her works for the Financial Times. “No! I work for the New Statesman,” I reply, not getting the joke. “And Michael Lewis is over there – you can spot Americans because they love white chinos.”

If the social gravity of London is slowly shifting away from east to west, then a turbocharged version of the phenomenon happens in Dublin for one weekend in June: the city clears out and descends on the county’s ersatz and Joycean coast with force. And not just for my excoriatingly clever ideas about Dostoevsky. One event asks: what books changed the world? Erm, the Bible? I suggest, with tremendous banality. Another panel asks: why does history matter? A good one to put to the Irish.

As we sit at the midpoint of the 2020s, we are well inured to cerebral handwringing about the death of the literary scene. They say it’s the phones, the iPads, the declining ambition of the West… Well, I’m not fretting any more, not least if the proliferation of the literary festival is anything to guide me.

There is Hay: a socks-and-sandals Remainer mecca on the Welsh border (150,000 attendees in 2025); Cheltenham: Stephen Fry fans, line up here (100,000 of them did in 2024); Edinburgh: a two-week bonanza of clipped Scottish accents (somehow as popular as Cheltenham); and Dalkey: population, Bono. With Dalkey as a noble exception, it all trends to the uncool. But if we can reduce these things to equations of footfall and star power, then the death of the written word has been declared somewhat prematurely.

John Updike thought of the novel as an “individual moral adventure” – a spiritual anathema to the literary festival, which from the green room down, is a collective occasion (a suburban book club meets the megachurch). And a cynic might swap the “moral adventure” of Updike’s mid-century American imagination for the very 2025 sneer: “status signalling”. To which I say, yes – and?

Maybe this is what literature is now: the author as entertainer; where Dua Lipa has a book club; and where cooing over Zadie Smith in a 500-capacity tent on the Welsh border is normal activity for the literary parvenu. Demur if you must: why should novelists have to explain themselves to a coterie of drunk fans in cardigans? One visit to the green room, where the novelists and déclassé journalists are having as good a time as the audience, provides its own answer.

Saturday evening now, and I am sitting in a garden in Dalkey – is this Ireland’s nicest town? – eating fish and talking to my Icelandic poet friend again. I am a long way from a dusty attic, parsing Ulysses in solitude, a more obviously honourable route through the literary realm.

But I am optimistic: thanks in part to Dostoevsky’s feted renaissance; thanks in main to the fact that this is fun. The Edge is also here – why not! And so, if literature is dead, at least the funeral is well attended. There is money behind the bar. And plenty of poached cod for the mourners.

[See also: The rise of the west]