Just In case you wondered …

… Joseph Epstein :What Happened to the Novel? - : :Commentary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Why, then, do these same dramas, set out in lengthy fictions, in our day no longer capture the imagination in the way they once did?
That they do not seems indubitable. Can anyone say he is awaiting the next novel of any living writer with the same eagerness that those of us old enough to remember awaiting the next Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, or Kingsley Amis novel? Is there anything like the same sense of excited anticipation for the future novels of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, or from England those of Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie? I don’t believe so. I keep a list of the books I read, and the past hundred of these books include novels by Denis Diderot, Heinrich Heine, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Vasily Grossman, but no novel written after 1990.

I am looking forward to the next by Tan Twan Eng. I reviewed his first two and loved both.  They seem to do what one finds in the great ones of the past.