And now we’re back. We’re not post-postmodern, we’re just later modern. All that experimentation in fiction is dead, for another set of reasons. Like p.c. ideology, experimentation is a sort of luxury item. When times get hard, you won’t hear anything about that kind of supersensitivity to people taking offense. And I think what has happened in fiction is that fiction has responded to the fact that the rate of history has accelerated in this last generation, and will continue to accelerate, with more sort of light-speed kind of communications. Those huge, leisurely, digressive, essayistic, meditative novels of the postwar era—some of which were on the best-seller lists for months—don’t have an audience anymore. - Martin Amis in an interview with David Wallace-Wells published today. Among the other topics covered in the lengthy chat: his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, porn, the decline of America, politics, Brooklyn, and that damn novel he wrote about videogames that nobody will let him live down.
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And now we’re back. We’re not post-postmodern, we’re just later modern. All that experimentation in fiction is dead, for another set of reasons. Like p.c. ideology, experimentation is a sort of luxury item. When times get hard, you won’t hear anything about that kind of supersensitivity to people taking offense. And I think what has happened in fiction is that fiction has responded to the fact that the rate of history has accelerated in this last generation, and will continue to accelerate, with more sort of light-speed kind of communications. Those huge, leisurely, digressive, essayistic, meditative novels of the postwar era—some of which were on the best-seller lists for months—don’t have an audience anymore.

- Martin Amis in an interview with David Wallace-Wells published today. Among the other topics covered in the lengthy chat: his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, porn, the decline of America, politics, Brooklyn, and that damn novel he wrote about videogames that nobody will let him live down.