…….Updike only died a few months ago ergo he’s a contemporary novelist…….McEwan has written at least one memorable book, Amis certainly one perhaps two, for every Wharton, James and Conrad writing in 1905 there were a dozen clunkers starting with G. K. Chesterton who is revered on the right but even more tedious than Ayn Rand and that’s saying something…….. and who reads H. G. Wells today? although he did create some memorable ideas

The tragedy at the end is also the tragedy of being poor and not buying into all of societies conventions, and the personal disasters that can result when people become stressed and desperate. It is the story we hear too frequently in America – the man who loses all and can’t support his family who turns his guns on them and then himself – but we don’t write novels about it.

………..I’m not sure this is true……in terms of the quantity of novels published my vague sense is that over the last 20 years as many as ever have been published probably more particularly since writers in other cultures who hitherto were largely unpublished in the west are finding their way here…….I’m sure 75 years ago we’d never have heard of Mahfouz…….you could argue the novel as art form is declining in quality…….to be honest I don’t read too many new novels and most don’t seem to measure up to a Fitzgerald, Conrad, Trollope, Waugh or Dickens although there are the odd exceptions…….but wasn’t it ever thus……..Fitzgerald has survived because he wrote some great novels amongst a lot of dross from people who are long forgotten

http://americaspeaksink.com/2009/05/fight-the-republican-purge/