At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

This month alone I've read two novels that fit this mould: King Fisher by Rozie Kelly and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The latter, in particular, I found deeply frustrating. There's no denying the novel's power or ambition, but the relentless absence of speech marks and the dense, unbroken prose repeatedly pulled me out of the story. I became more aware of the author's stylistic choices than I was of the narrative itself. 

These are only two recent examples. There are so many more. Sally Rooney abandoned quotation marks years ago. Cormac McCarthy stripped punctuation back to its bare essentials. However, only for his later novels (from 1985's Blood Meridian onwards). Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport stretched across a single, sprawling sentence for much of its 1,000 pages. 

And I can't help wondering: at what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

To be fair, this isn't a new phenomenon, nor is it without purpose.

Where did the punctuation-free movement in literary fiction begin?

The roots lie in the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner wanted to capture a stream of consciousness as it was experienced rather than as it was neatly written down. Thoughts don't arrive with perfect punctuation, so why should novels? Later, minimalist writers argued that quotation marks interrupted the flow between dialogue and narration. European literary traditions also influenced English-language fiction, where dialogue has often been punctuated differently from the conventions we expect in British publishing.

These weren't gimmicks. They were genuine artistic experiments.

The trouble is that experiments have a habit of becoming conventions.

What began as a radical departure from established rules now feels almost expected in certain corners of literary fiction. Open the Booker Prize longlist and there's a reasonable chance you'll find missing quotation marks, fragmented structure or prose that seems determined to resist easy reading. They have become visual cues that quietly suggest, "This is serious literature."

Has that assumption gone unchallenged for too long?

Genre fiction offers an interesting contrast

Crime writers rarely expect readers to untangle conversations in the middle of an interrogation. Fantasy authors don't usually abandon punctuation while introducing an unfamiliar world full of invented names and complex politics. Thriller writers understand that pace depends upon clarity.

This isn't because genre fiction lacks ambition or literary merit. Quite the opposite. It reflects a different understanding of the relationship between writer and reader. The story comes first. Style exists to support it rather than compete with it.

Literary fiction often seems to operate under a different agreement. The reading experience itself becomes part of the art. Difficulty is not necessarily a flaw. Sometimes it is the point.

And sometimes it works brilliantly.

Cormac McCarthy's sparse punctuation became inseparable from his unmistakable voice. You could argue that Prophet Song uses its relentless style to mirror the suffocating anxiety and loss of control experienced by its protagonist. Even if I found it frustrating, I can understand why Paul Lynch made those choices.

But understanding a decision doesn't automatically mean enjoying it.

Nor does it mean every writer who follows the same path has earned it.

This is where I begin to wonder whether there is an element of performance involved.

Once enough acclaimed novels abandon quotation marks, the absence itself starts to acquire cultural cachet. It becomes shorthand for seriousness. For literary ambition. For writing that deserves prizes and critical acclaim.

Yet removing punctuation doesn't automatically make prose more profound. It doesn't make characters more believable. It doesn't make ideas more intelligent. It doesn't make average novels better. Sometimes it simply makes the reader work harder.

However, there seems to be this unspoken assumption that effort equals value. If a novel requires more concentration, more patience and more decoding, then surely it must be saying something deeper. I'm not convinced. 

Some of the greatest novels ever written are astonishingly readable. Their complexity comes from the ideas they explore, the people they create and the emotional truths they uncover, not from forcing readers to decipher who is speaking on every page. I'd argue that's the harder achievement.

Perhaps what troubles me most is that these stylistic choices have become clichés in their own right. Ironically, what was once innovative now feels almost formulaic and performative. A style rather than a literary choice. Sparse punctuation. Blurred dialogue. Fragmented structure. Long, breathless sentences. They can begin to feel less like artistic necessity and more like symbols of literary credibility.

That's a dangerous place for any art form to find itself.

Innovation matters. Writers should challenge convention. Every literary movement has been built on someone refusing to follow the rules.

Rules should only be broken for a reason

When a stylistic decision deepens the emotional experience, I'm all for it. But when it merely advertises that a novel is literary, I'm far less persuaded. That's performative. 

So, perhaps that's the real question. Not whether literary novels should abandon punctuation. But whether we've reached the point where making books harder to read has become an end in itself.

I'd rather be moved than impressed.