Interesting. I agree that much of narrative fiction is moribund for just these reasons, but I offer one example where narrative still has a place: speculative fiction (for lack of a more elegant turn of phrase).

The apex of speculative fiction: the ghost story, which still relies completely on atmosphere, mood, pacing and plot for its (eternal) effectiveness.

The novel is dead? Bullshit. This is the same intellectual self-replicating navel-gazing crap I used to hear in capital-A Art school in the late 80's (UC Davis, 1984-89). Then again, in Design school in the 90's, your ilk were proclaiming the imminent death of all narrative in any context; novel, play, performance art, whatever. From now on, we would all be looking at text and "reading" images. Text has finally been reduced to it's visual impact alone. Hallelujah!

Unfortunatley, you can't tell when the next train will depart and from which platform by looking at text, you actually have to read it. You also can't relate a story of what happened to you for some period of time without some kind of narrative form.

Maybe the 14 of you who read each other's sophomoric rants and pass judgment on the rest of us morons can convince each other this kind of drivel has actual meaning, but meanwhile out in the real world of novel-consuming humans, writers are still writing stories with climactic endings, and readers are still buying their books.

Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting Gregory David Robert's next NOVEL, and if you can cut back on your meth or whatever you're smoking long enough to re-establish brain activity to the level at which you can think more than 4 sequential thoughts without hitting the pipe again, maybe you'll be able to muster the patience to get through it.

OK, I apologize for the reactive tone of my last comment, and withdraw the extraneous attacks. However, I stand by my main point, that the novel is not dead, or even on life-support.

From the book:

"You have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set."

If the experience of reading the novel is not in itself enough reason to linger over the 700 pages of "elabotate, overbuilt stage set", then you're reading or writing a shitty, shallow novel. The elaborate stage set only seems overbuilt when the message and layers of the novel are too easily understood, too blatantly waved in the reader's face, and too thoughtless and unispired to support the elaborate structure.

Go read Shantaram again(I assume you've read it, if you haven't then you have no business reviewing books for the local high school in Spokane, WA), after reading Robert's own discourse on that novel's architecture, and come back here and try with a straight face to opine on the death of the novel. (http://www.shantaram.com/pages/Shantaram…)

Then talk to me about Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison. The experience itself of reading anything by either of them is justification for the novel's continued existence. If you can't write at that level, with that kind of rigorous adherence to your own voice (what Roberts calls Truth, like authenticity) then you have no business attempting a novel.

I'm just getting started, this is fair warning.

The novel started as a blog. A series of episodes written by Dickens, delivered to the door of customers. Or maybe you would call it a tv show...a soap opera. No wonder those books you read in high school are so big ... when those guys got a "hit" it probably went on forever so they could get maximum return.

Then the novel got all arty. I mean, I love Gravity's Rainbow, but can you imagine Victorian families getting a chapter every week delivered by some street gamin? "Mom, WTF is this?!" (Or back then, "Mother, what in the devil's name...My Word! Who wrote this?")

Exactly.

Personally, I think I just flat out refuse to believe the novel is dying.

However, I also believe there are valid points here. Jonathan Franzen made some similar observations several years ago. I want to say those were in an essay in How to Be Alone, but my memory may be failing me there.

I'm also a bit confused by some of the points made. (No, someotheroxford, no meth happening on my end, promise.)

Could we get Paul Constant to comment on the death of the novel and/or this book and/or this review? Er . . . or has he already commented on something similar someplace else? Anyone want to point me toward a link? (A couple of Google searches didn't yield anything that looked promising.) Seems like this is the sort of thing that would draw his attention, and I'd be interested to hear what he has to say. I know we can request he read a book for us, but since this one's already been reviewed by another Stranger staff member, that might seem a bit redundant . . .

"The novel has lost much of its force and should be avoided by writers who have any real interest in the future of writing. 'This is the case for most novels,' he writes in entry 378"

Serious flaw in the overall concept: if the novel has lost it's force, why does Shields bother to mention it at all? If this new form is so all-fired up hot shit, then just create in it and let it succeed or fail on it's own merits. That Shields feels the need to *procalim* the novel dead, implies without a doubt he still has feelings for it, is not really past it, and is attempting to kill it to make his point. How provocative.

I'd bet anything that the same form, stripped of all commentary on the relative merits of the novel, would lose it's polemic stance, most of the controversy, and 90% of the interest it may have. Prove me wrong: point me to a compelling instance of this post novel form that has no reference to the life or death of the novel.

If we are truly post-novel, we need not refer to it any more. The analogy to modernist architecture is also fatally flawed: the modernists (architects only in this case) did not hold onto any of the tired forms of the past, and where they succeeded, they truly created something new and useful on it's own merits. They stripped the building down to it's frame, then burned that down and created a new frame, filled it as needed with spaces that responded only to the needs of the function within, and NOWHERE did they waste time sitting around creating space the sole purpose of which was a petty commentary on the imminent death of previous architectural forms; indeed, they commented on that death, but only in essays and manifestos. The new form stood on its own as a testament to that death, without having to display it like some architectural graveyard.

Modernism suffered it's own slow death later, but that's another story, which however, could be explored and shown to be a good analogy for how the novel is still alive; changed forever, perhaps, but certain qualities that Shields claims need to be stripped out (narrative) are actually fundamental to a healthy discourse on the human condition.

The writer as reader in 2010, as witness to an unfolding, one who understands the fragility of the project, which is to say narrative on any level. This seems to be Shields plainest offering, one I find quite unobjectionable. Of course a beautifully rendered narrative is still around, and of course there will always be a gentle few of us to read them, but Shields is suggesting a new platform of consciousness, of the mind floating in space, networked with (and overwhelmed by) adjacent ideas and stories. And hasn't it alway been the novel's job to reflect the contemporary mind. More than wanting to stomp the novel's bloodied face, he wants to illustrate modern consciousness cracked-open. That's brave.

You can call it "writer as reader", but the effect is Shields has attempted to wedge a blog into a book and call it a new form, end of story. The debate over fiction/non-fiction, novel, autobiography, is all missing the point.

With that appropriation, he’s exposed himself on several fronts, the most dangerous being that we are now free to dismiss his work as easily as surfing to a better, more timely blog.

The debate swirling around the book has been confused by the disguise: book, so we all jump around trying to classify it in terms of every other book, when it has more in common with a tv gossip show (The Insider, last year, with only one host).

As he has disavowed footnotes as being so passe, we are free to call his book rubbish and move on, without reference or reasoned, sourced arguments.

The other dangers of the blog-novel are self evident: every journalistic pitfall inherent in every blog have come along for the appropriation.

If, for a moment, we are to take him seriously, we can take note that he has swallowed Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact,

http://danielnester.com/2010/03/09/diagr… (thanks, Daniel, for the link)

got it stuck in his throat, and whether he wants to or not, assumes the new role of author-oracle, feeding us bits of reality and pithy commentary so that we, the unwashed masses, are now enlightened by the TRUTH that our own experience of reality utterly failed to show us.