80.17a

“How is Fiction Doing?” New York Times Book Review, 14 December, 3, 30. Several novelists, including John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Scott Spencer join Mailer in prognosticating on the novel’s future. Mailer says that although the form is “cut off on one flank by film, and on the other by history (which has become more novelistic than the novel),” he predicts that novelists “will break out of our cysts, infiltrate other disciplines, inhabit new epistemological modes . . . and produce flowers never glimpsed before.”