constructing a creative "theory of everything"

This post from Granta.com on The Reader and Technology, by Toby Litt, seems to concur (or at least converge) with my post from a few days ago wherein I speculate why Young Adult fiction is so popular:

Novels have always belonged to aristocrats of time; not, I say, merely to aristocrats, although they have been disproportionately represented, but to those subjects who have freedom of choice about how to act within time. The Fordist factory-line workers, performing a repetitive task all day, cannot interest the novel for more than a few moments whilst they are at work. It is only when the machine stops that the story begins. (David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King attempts to make a novel out of the dead time of insanely repetitive deskwork; and it fails, at least in the form of it he left us.)

Where I must begin to disagree is at the next sentence:

Proposition: ‘The human race is no longer sufficently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.’

All evidence to the contrary. No? This seems so obvious that I feel no need to bore you with the details.

Perhaps novels will continue, but instead of the machine it will be the connectivity that stops, or becomes secondary.

What we’re going to see more and more of is the pseudo-contemporary novel – in which characters are, for some reason, cut off from one another, technologically cut off. Already, many contemporary novels avoid the truly contemporary (which is hyperconnectivity).

Here I think the author is talking about something else entirely: the structure of the novel itself. And again, I must respectfully disagree. I think the next generation is going to handle cell phones and IM’s and connectivity between characters just fine – case in point, Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, if you want to see how it’s done. Half the conversations in the book take place via text messages or IM, and the authors manage to inject as much angst and disconnect as any novel needs. Proving, if anything, that human beings are capable of misunderstanding each other just as much when they’re within cell phone range as not. So I think the novel is safe, for now…  (dum, dum, dummmm).

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