What Can Novels Do?

Is it good to go to war with contemporary literature? It’s at least a genre. A fun place to start is Elif Batuman’s eminently spicy “Get a Real Degree,” but there are many other places you could look: from Becca Rothfeld we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with social media-born, anxiously-enacted, moral scrupulousness; from Parul Sehgal we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with simplified trauma plots; Jackson Arn tells us the contemporary essay has, among other things, a problem with routine ambivalence; and the editors at n+1 tell us the contemporary review has a problem with grouping works by their thematic problems.