This article doesn't mention Richard Brautigan, but in my opinion, several of his experimental novels were/are classics. My favorite Brautigan novel is Confederate General at Big Sur.

Another, much more current experimental writer I'd like to tout (also from the West Coast) is Denis Johnson. His novel Already Dead is wonderfully-written, from beginning to end.

Funny you should mention Brautigan -- my favorite novel of his is In Watermelon Sugar, but The Abortion is also fine -- because as I was reading this essay I was thinking how much more fractured and messed up the contemporary poetry scene is. Would that poets only had to contend with a straw devil like Robbe-Grillet! I was supposed to read one of his brief novels in college, but couldn't get through it. Not because it was difficult -- it was boring.

Brautigan was also a poet and prize student of Jack Spicer, a really fine "poet's poet" that not even many poets read or appreciate. Brautigan's novels are wonderful because they're not really novels, they're wild and funny and definitely not boring. Experimental in the best sense of the word -- without paradigmatic rules or stacks of theory more interesting than they are. As someone who enjoys both forms (prose and poetry), I hope that more readers pick up on writers like this who actively blend genres and blur boundaries. Mitchell is good -- though Cloud Atlas is by far his best -- and another, not mentioned here, is recent Nat. Book Award winner Nathaniel Mackey.

"...too easy to produce"

What? I had a helluva time making my way through Repetition, got only half way through In the Labryinth, and can't ever find The Erasures. (Probably on ABE now that I think about it). The A.R-G is not my favorite and his work is certainly very demanding. I can't for a moment possibly believe that his texts are in any way 'easy to produce'. What does the author of this article means by that line?

"The Erasers" is the only one of Robbe-Grillet's books I ever read. It was a long time ago, but I remember enjoying it--it really didn't seem pretentious, dry, or strange to me, though I don't like(or don't understand) experimental fiction in general.

Was I the only reader who was appalled that the writer of this article felt "relief" (mentioned twice!) at Alain Robbe-Grillet's death because of the latter's philosophy of the novel, and influence on some novelists?

I love novels. I read incessantly. But there's something horribly disproportionate about being so dismissive about another person's death when the disagreement is primarily an artistic one. It's not as though Robbe-Grillet's attitudes, which he was entirely entitled to, caused people to die in Africa or suffer on the streets of Chicago. And the only power he had was that given to him freely by other writers.

"Now we can go on"? You could have gone on any time you wanted. Write the novel you want to write; hope that it finds its rightful audience. I'm sorry if Robbe-Grillet's influence made it a little harder for "good" novels to get the best reviews and publishing deals (if indeed it did), but it's always been a chancy business.

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.

At one time, there may have been room enough for only one kind of novel at a time. But that time was probably even before Robbe-Grillet, whose "The Voyeur" captivated me for years with its cinematic use of scene and revisitation of scene, its ambiguity in the midst of clarity, its presaging of video techniques and pharmaceutically-dazed culture. The unblinking eye of the seagull was a camera lens and a reflection of amorality among many other things. Far from killing the novel or limiting the scope of what the novel could be, Robbe-Grillet juxtaposed artistic writing with the art of other media of the time.

Sure there is a resurgence of 19th-century sensibility in literature today; call it fin-de-siecle, or just borrowing from the past. Styles ebb and flow, but there's always room for more.

To call Robbe-Grillet's work "easy to produce" smacks of pure petty jealousy. Writers have always walked the tight-rope between art and pop culture and they will continue to do so. Nabokov gained an audience with Lolita, but lost it with Ada, a difficult but beautiful work. The big picture right now is that there is no big picture. Soon a new paradigm will emerge and engulf an entire generation of artists. The contrarians will counter, as they do. And then at the end of another century, another critic will say it's all dead and will refuse to weep at the funeral. But then again, why mourn? A novelist may have died, but the novel is still in my hands.

Of course, they were great novelists and Robbe-Grillet wasn't (though Marienbad is a great film and his screenplay is brilliant), but a writer can't be blamed for scaring off readers and causing his contemporaries to go too far in the opposite direction. Whitman had a disastrous influence on thousands of poets, but it isn't his fault that they're not Whitman. Besides, Robbe-Grillet's influence wasn't entirely negative; I like a lot of Barthelme and Barth's work. I also don't know if this more experimental stuff that you allude to at the end of your article is very good. I've seen parts of Junot Diaz and I didn't like it at all. His voice is very odd; it reminds me of one of those annoying narrators you occasionally find in bad teen movies. It's like someone's sitting next to you conversationally telling you an interminable story, replete, of course, with endless lists of meaningless details and signifiers because that's just what writers do these days. And Safran Foer... he's brilliant but to me his stuff is just really, really bad 21st century Tristram Shandy.