Newsflash! The Novel’s On Its Deathbed!

Sam Jones offers up this tidbit from a Newshour interview with Philip Roth that essentially repeats the pronouncements made by V.S. Naipaul a few weeks ago:

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it’s become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don’t think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it’s inevitable. I think the… there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel’s day has come and gone, really.

Now you’re on notice. Better finish the Great American Novel before long.