1/ Oh, ffs. I am not going to give this person the satisfaction of being re-tweeted or quote-tweeted. But his take is so musty, so redolent of the white patriarchy, and so clearly the product of a myopic, narrow-minded reading pattern as to render serious response almost moot.

2/ But a few comments. a) Men like Tom Wolfe have been making a similar argument about the death of the novel for well over 30 years, and the argument was just as empty then as now. b) If your primary points of reference for modern novelists are Franzen, Houellebecq, and Hornby,

3/ you are not only possibly but actually quite clearly overlooking or disregarding more than half of current novelists--that is, all those who aren& #39;t white European or American men--and also sealing away a vast swath of fiction in genre silos. c) A powerful argument

4/ can be made that in fact in the last 25 years, the reach of the novel has expanded, and that the variety and types of superb, literary-caliber novels one can now enjoy is unprecedented. Read the works of Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Ursula K.

5/ LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, N.K. Jemisin, Colson Whitehead, Hilary Mantel, Naguib Mahfouz, Michael Chabon, Jesmyn Ward, David Mitchell, Yoko Ogawa, Kate Atkinson, Jeanette Winterson--to name only a few--& here you find everything novels are capable of: deep profundity, rollicking

6/ entertainment, vivid world-building, grave seriousness and buoyant humor, story-telling on both epic and intimate scales, and keen insight into the human condition.

The novel is alive and well. It& #39;s just that both the books and their authors look different than they used to.