The death of the novel

Just as Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, the death of fiction (at least in form of the written word) is upon us. The short story is long gone, poetry rendered irrelevant without a backing beat, and now the novel as a piece of art is relegated to the trash heap of history - though, since history is done, the meaning of this is unclear.

We're talking about the literary novel, of course, a form of long-winded expression that is capable of describing a moment in human civilization, of circling and enveloping and describing in detail the arc of a people, from birth to death, from passionate love to saturated hate, from selfless sacrifice to narcissistic obsession, from the dregs of slavery to the glory of freedom, from the horrors of war to the whispered soliloquy of peace.

This means that the literary novelist is an obsolete figure. Lament the disappearance of Dickens, Dostoevsky, of Camus and Tolstoy, even Twain and Hemmingway. We will never see their like again.

Yet the panderings to the mass-market, the populist fare that somehow captivates the

appetite of the multitudes with its nutrition-free offerings, survive and prosper.

But the success of the pop-literati is not the full story. Somehow the examination of the large issues

in life, be they philosophical, political, economic, scientific or ethical, have been relegated to the non-fiction aisles (nonwithstanding the James Frey pseudo-controversy). Fiction, as they teach us, is all about personal stories - alive with peculiar detail of the lives of these fabricated characters - in order that we can identify, so that we can delve with vicarious pleasure into these

fictional realms. As a result, however, the fiction lacks the social context to deal with, in a meaningful manner,

the issues of the day.

Of course, my musings are not original. Ironically they were repeated recently in a Globe and Mail article describing the Infinite Summer blog, created by a group of people who've dedicated their summer to reading the novel 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace. This book is revered by some as a modern classic, a thousand page plus tome (with copious footnoted asides) that rivals the masterworks mentioned above.

Perhaps this was the last NOVEL ever written. Certainly, it was the last novel by this author - he committed suicide while attempting to write a followup.

I suppose I should read it then. If only I had an infinite summer.