Literary Hub has posted a gem of an essay from Saul Bellow; he riffs on literary tropes, the trajectory of the novel, and how, even if it’s gotten close, it’s never actually dying:
We know that science has a future, we hope that government will have one. But it is not altogether agreed that the novel has anything but a past. There are some who say that the great novelists of the twentieth century—Proust, Joyce, Mann and Kafka—have created sterile masterpieces and that with them we have come to the end of the line. No further progress is possible.
