Ben,

Hangs ten ... writers.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Not that the novel is bad, but that people have stopped reading much. There are two kinds of people on the train - those with iPods and those with books. Guess who's in the majority?

I also love good films and music, for what they are. But Cormac McCarthy is surely laughing if you think he didn't have something to do with the success of "No Country." Much of the language couldn't have been done by most screenwriters. Good writing is musical, visual and even 'smells.' Another Frenchman, Mr. Proust, would note the latter.

Upton Sinclair provided the essential background for "Blood." However, that film is a perfect example of using literature, but going beyond the original story to create something new. And good films based on books always do that, if they cannot re-create the novel is some way.

As to all the excellent letters here, Mr. Marche has been properly roasted. Viva la difference!

Stephen Marche says that when he reads my essays he feels as if he has to put on a tie and silence his cellphone. When I read him, I feel I would rather be ON my cellphone -- talking to anyone, anyone in the world.

For the record, though I doubt the record interferes much with the complacent composure of your contributor, I rather liked the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. La jalousie, as someone else has always remarked, is pretty compelling (in a nouveau roman-ish way), and Pour un nouveau roman is right in may ways (right for instance about how realism gets continuallly rejigged -- by writers who claim that they are the new realists). I quoted it in my new book, How Fiction Works. For the record, I do not want to restore the nineteenth-century novel: Monica Ali was a specific instance of such restoration, and deserved notice for that. And what on earth does the contributor who writes, in effect, "the best way to deal with James Wood is to ignore him and read Alice Munro" mean? I guess he is unaware that I have written an essay in praise of Alice Munro. Such accumulated foolishness and ignorance -- Marche's philistine piece, and several of the responses -- is the sort of thing that gives the internet a bad name. I thought that Amazon.com existed for such sanctioned idiocy, not Salon.

--James Wood

Let me get this straight... and these are serious questions, I am not being ironic or facetious.

Are influential critiques like Robbe-Grillet's at least in part why experimental / avant-garde or surrealist writers like Richard Brautigan and Anais Nin are often dismissed by reviewers as trivial, "major minor writers" and otherwise unimportant? (See Nin's analysis "The Novel of the Future")

If Robbe-Grillet and his ilk turned back the clock to wood paneling and turn-off-your-cellphone, why are modern novels so difficult to read? (See "A Reader's Manifesto", and also "Books I'd Prefer Not To" in Salon archives) Isn't Toni Morrison's work considered pretty experimental, for instance? Wouldn't "traditional" be more like Dickens, Jane Austen or the Brontes?

Oh, yes, but who cares about Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"? Maybe the New York Times Book Review? Well, that publication is full of wonderfully messy novels that no one cares about. Talk about "self involved" ...

Not a one of these novelists could ever envision works as original as "Jealousy" or "The Erasers". And I'd like to see them even have a dream as provocative and chilling as Last Year in Marienbad.

Nobody cares about the novel anymore because, as they used to say about jazz (and probably still should) "it's not dead, but it smells funny". Nothing challenges, nothing is controversial, nothing is condemned by atavistic killjoys ...

In a way, it's good you're glad he's dead. It shows that the "old new" may still have some life left in it, as a foil for the "new old ... and getting older".

Well, Tina, since you ask, I think the people I am paid to educate at "this cow pasture college," which just happens to own the 4th largest library in the world, are amzingly smarter than francophobic twits like Marche and yourself.

But then again, I don't teach journalists.

"Many novelists you've probably never heard of were deeply influenced by Robbe-Grillet," writes Marche. Sure, and at least two who write bestsellers and whose work is judged to have staying power: Paul Auster and Kazuo Ishiguro. Auster has a regular gig on NPR and Ishiguro's work has been adapted for blockbuster films. Hard to get more mainstream than that.

Auster's New York Trilogy works the same spare, haunted territory that Robbe-Grillet mapped in The Erasers and In the Labyrinth. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more faithful and viable translation of Robbe-Grillet's ideas in contemporary fiction than Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, a virtually plotless book that, despite its Mobius-strip narrative, still manages to be gripping. Like Robbe-Grillet, both Auster and Ishiguro seem to enjoy frustrating readers' desire for narrative closure. They don't write page-turners, but readers can and do take pleasure in their books.

I'm actually an academician, friend. Neither of us appear to posses the freighted objectivity to even deign to enter journalism, low as that fruit may hang. And you spelled amazingly wrong -- that is, in the spirit of the master, you spelled "amazingly" wrong. Are you in one of those states where the WPA hasn't humped spellcheck over the ridges on the backs of sledding dogs yet? Really, when you write about a novel with 200 words, you should, at least hydraulically, make each of yours count.

I was a young girl wedged between the English-speaking and the French-speaking worlds, and for me there was one calling only: writing. Bad luck, when I started I was no longer living in London, I was in Lausanne, Switzerland, studying in French. French had become my writing language (I should have persevered with English, of course, but I didn't understand that then). And Robbe-Grillet had been King-of-the-New-Novel (which was then considered THE novel) for a while, then. Long enough to have seeped through French Switzerland (which is always a little late on Paris), and for a budding writer there was no choice: either write a New Novel, or stop writing.

I accept I was too impressionable, but it takes time to find one's own marks. I managed to write a novel, trying to make concessions to the DICTATORSHIP which the New Novel had become, but unable to go all the way. I could never forget the great classics, from Dumas to Jack London, from Henry Fielding to Zola. My novel wasn't accepted by any publisher then (it has been published since, after Robbe-Grillet has been somehow forgotten, and has had its success).

In fact, the New Novel was not my thing - but I was too inexperienced to see that.

I have thought quite a lot about the problem since. I am a voracious reader in a number of languages, and very often I find French novels much inferior in tension, story-telling etc. The best French novels of the last 30-40 years were written by novelists who had an English (or russian, or German, or Italian) tradition behind them (Yourcenar, Gary and such).

It took Theatre Director Benno Besson, one of the greatest directors of the 2nd half of the XXth Century (he had started out as Brecht's assistant), to change my view of things. I was lucky enough to be one of his assistants for 3 years, and once, while I was brooding aloud about my inability to write the novel I felt I had in me, he said: «With the New Novel, the French have put a pall on storytelling, and a whole generation of writers is either unable to tell stories, or, like you, too weak to follow its calling. If you have a story to tell, tell it: it can carry the dominant ideology, or it can suggest new things, but the important thing is to write for real people, not just for elites. Some writers do that, but it cannot be a must for everyone. After all, storytelling is one of the greatest forms of art of the bourgeoisie.»

Besson actually opened the door to storytelling for me, and I have written novels since, all published, all well read, with no ideological concessions in spite of their "classical" form.

It was OK for Robbe Grillet to suggest one could also think and write outside tradition, what was wrong, was making of it the MUST this way of thinking has been for a long time, and thus obscure the real issue. Brautigan and such never asked that from us.

There is the constructed story, and the deconstructed one.

The only "mistake" Robbe-Grillet and those who followed him made, was declaring the constructed story had to die. They should live side by side - thus Steven Marche and I would be spared the "confusing relief" he speaks of.