Sunday, July 04, 2010

The American Novel, R. I. P.

Literary storm rages as critic Lee Siegel pronounces the American novel dead | Books | The Observer: "Book pundits in the United States are being urged to line up on one side or other this summer: Is the American novel finally dead or not? The row began when the controversial critic Lee Siegel wrote a piece for the New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of fire, has lost its spark for ever.

'For about a million reasons,' Siegel claimed, 'fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers.'"

3 comments:

Gerard Saylor said...

blah blah blah.

Cap'n Bob said...

So non-fiction is the new fiction? He's been reading too many political bios.

WV: trite. Seriously. How appropriate.

Anonymous said...

Given that he is a critic, I strongly suspect he is talking about "literary" fiction only. If so, how can he make such a drastic claim without properly assessing the genres? You might as well say the age of the automobile is dead because Ford haven't made anything good for a while.