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Since you are a self-confessed novelist, it is perhaps unsurprising that you are so ignorant of the history of the novel. Firstly, the idea that Robbe-Grillet should be judged on the fate of the novel in the English-speaking world is pathetically ethnocentric. Secondly, the idea that England in particular ever produced a literary avant-garde is wofully misinformed. The journey back to the nineteenth century taken by Atonement, a novel in every respect inferior to La Jalousie, is an incredibly short one. Unlike the Irish, the english never did mange to get their novels out of the nineteenth century, and that includes Woolf, who took it upon herself to pronounce the Victorian age over even as novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To thew Lighthouse extended it, at least for literature. Finally, the fatuousness of the notion that having a philosophical basis for a novel is silly can be proven with one word: Doestoyevsky. I've never read any of your novels, Stephen Marche, and neither has anyone in the large English department in which I teach. The nonsense paraded in this column does not increase the likelihood that we ever will.
