America has produced only one great essayist of the sort that Charles Lamb and G. K. Chesterton were: someone capable of composing a seemingly effortless short piece that begins by describing a trivial incident like a bug bite and goes from there to a thoughtful consideration of life’s essential questions. Still with us, he’s a retired Northwestern University professor named Joseph Epstein.

Epstein’s latest book is an extended look at the novel. It has two aims: to persuade us that it is a uniquely important art form and to examine why it appears to be losing readers. That latter concern was particularly awakened in 2015 when he received a package in the mail. Contained within was a comic-book version of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Swann’s Way had been given the same treatment as a rooftop battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin.

Epstein’s brief for the novel is, in fact, brief. It runs to just 126 pages of text. Within that modest space he manages to provide his extended defense and a series of ruminations on which novels are the best. It should be noted that his concern is with serious fiction. He sees the principal value of writers such as Stephen King and James Patterson in their serving as a footpath by which readers may be brought towards the royal road. Epstein is unabashed in putting forth his devotion to high culture.

One target that draws his special ire has targeted him in the past: the politically correct. Epstein doesn’t mention that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, arguably America’s finest novel, is almost never taught in schools any longer. That’s because in its deliberate assault on racism, the book makes use of the N-word, and teachers don’t dare to engage in what could be construed as a microaggression. But he notes that the union of political correctness with our present therapeutic culture may be nearly as much of a threat to the novel as the ready availability and persistent appeal of cellphones and the internet. And there can be no doubt but that he is right about this. Consider that Dickens’s David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, once staples of high-school reading, are likewise being snatched away. That’s at least partly because the demoralization of our culture makes a proper reading of these books difficult, if not impossible. How does a teacher explain to students that Martha Endell has not made a reasonable career choice in becoming a “sex worker” but has fallen into prostitution, or that the Artful Dodger isn’t merely the prey of circumstance but a career criminal? How do you say that Fagin is an evil pedophile rather than a probable victim of molestation who merely perpetuates a cycle of abuse?

Until the beginning of the 20th century, novels were generally regarded much as movies were in the 1950s: as no more than popular entertainment for the masses. But Epstein makes a good case that the best are more valuable instruments for cultivating understanding of the problems of life than are any works of nonfiction and that they more thoroughly probe motivation and character than plays do. As someone who made his reputation as a dramatist and has just published a first novel, I am somewhat shamefully inclined to agree with him — in a measure, anyway. After all, when you think you have witnessed something profound in the theater, it may owe as much to the subtlety of the actor as to the words he’s been provided.

At a cocktail party some years ago, I encountered an interesting snippet of evidence for Epstein’s belief that fiction can be more revealing than nonfiction. During a conversation with the famous psychologist Carol Gilligan, I learned that she assigned her graduate students Anna Karenina. One of the most thoughtful and humane living interpreters of the mind, it turned out, believed that her students could learn more from reading it than from studying a psychology textbook. A great novel, Epstein suggests, is something that brings us deeply into the thoughts and feelings of another person, showing us, in a fashion otherwise impossible, this enormously varied and intricate moral and emotional landscape.

Epstein freely admits that the number of readers capable of gathering the illumination offered by reading a first-rate novel was never large. But he believes that its loss — should people turn away from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Austen, and the rest — will be immense. Nonetheless, he is not prescriptive. He offers no national plan or policy to be implemented in response. What he does provide readers with is a road map and some directions should they wish to set out on the journey, and he is a critic possessed of unusual perceptiveness and uncommon refinement. Like Gilligan (and me), Epstein sees Tolstoy as the medium’s exemplar, observing that art forms are not like knowledge in science: There is no necessary upward trajectory with later periods rising to higher levels.

Epstein says he cannot explain why certain periods during the last few centuries produced a surfeit of outstanding novelists while others did not. He makes this statement after listing sudden flowerings of novel-writing talent in England, Russia, France, and America. Using remarkably similar lists, I once charted the pattern and came to what I think is a reasonable inference. The period after the Napoleonic Wars in England and France, the 1850s and 1860s in Russia, and the 1920s in the United States were moments of peace and relative prosperity, times when would-be writers weren’t obliged to pursue other occupations. That Germany and Italy didn’t experience such high points reflects the late date of their unifications and their lack of uniform copyright laws. Gifted novelists such as Goethe and Manzoni couldn’t and didn’t try to make a career of novel-writing because cheap, pirated copies of their works, for which they were paid nothing, were available in every German and Italian bookshop.

Epstein is not only a sensitive but a remarkably honest critic. Hence, he questions the lasting value of both Saul Bellow’s and Tom Wolfe’s novels, no matter that both men effusively praised him. I was puzzled, however, in one respect by his list of the best novels. Reading along, I thought at once of half a dozen of what I think are the finest, of which he made no mention: Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring, Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Dawn Powell’s The Locusts Have No King, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Then I realized that they have something in common. Epstein’s exceptional refinement may have a drawback. He says that sex scenes in books typically subtract more than they add. While this may well be, many of life’s decisions and moral questions revolve around physical attraction and desire, and that is a central theme of each of these books. Might Epstein be underestimating that?

This is quibbling, though. Those readers who love the novel and those who seek to gain a due regard for it would do well to read this short yet remarkably rich exploration of the subject.