The Novel's Only Morality

As the major writers of the late 20th century leave us month by month, we should ask ourselves what irreplaceable elements of our literary culture are vanishing along with them. With Martin Amis went the Nabokovian-Bellovian commitment to literary style as both an end in itself and as an ethic of precise observation encapsulated in his famous phrase “the war against cliché”; with Cormac McCarthy was lost the willingness of publishers not only to keep on the books but positively to nurture an idiosyncratic if un-lucrative visionary in the event that his works would eventually find their public, as McCarthy’s did in the end.