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Jason Epstein suggests that "people don't look to novels for what they used to. When I was in college, you looked at them for the truth. That transcendental phase is out now. I think perhaps novels succeeded too well—they told all they could. People look elsewhere for what they once got from novels—it may be to social writing or maybe TV, depending on who they are."
In his book Waiting for the End, Leslie Fiedler argues that the novel may simply disappear. If so, it will be "first, because the artistic faith that sustained its writers is dead, and second, because the audience need that it was invented to satisfy is being better satisfied otherwise"—by pornography and television, the movies and other forms of pop entertainment, for instance.
The Great Bunch. Cerf agrees that there is a malaise in fiction today. "Novelists are still saying things," he declares, "but they are no longer saying them exclusively. To say anything startlingly new in a novel is difficult—it's being said so often by real life, and in the world of reporting and commentary. Most novels today represent the fears rather than the hopes of man. Maybe that's one trouble: the mood is too pessimistic. But it's a gloomy world. We're not in a happy period of our history."
And yet Cerf is keenly, folksily optimistic. He feels that there are positive forces at work too. "The trash market is always with us, but the thrill of dirty words and explicit sex episodes is a very evanescent one, and as the taboos drop, it is already beginning to pall. Today's writers are a great bunch. Out of that group will emerge the next Hemingway and Faulkner. You can't rush it."