Signs and portents of the times

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some life in it; the form seemed as dead as the concerto grosso. But Zadie Smith’s brilliant On Beauty revived it with fizzing energy. On the other hand, a fictional standby which has seemed perfectly serviceable for some years may suddenly start looking creaky. I would say that five years ago, the sort of English magic realist text in which characters sprout wings or tails stopped looking like bold feats of the imagination and started looking like the painfully conventional products of creative writing classes.

Sometimes this springs from the insistence of critical comment. For a while now critics have been complaining about new novels set in odd corners of the world, and asking for a little more in the way of domestic realism.