The Crisis That Novelists Can’t Handle

Is there any subject that fiction cannot address? From its beginnings as a form, the novel has dealt with love and hate, war and peace, courage and cowardice, boredom and catastrophe. Yet there is far more in heaven and earth than any human can convey. In the view of the writer Amitav Ghosh, one subject especially threatens to elude fiction’s comprehension. “The climate crisis,” he writes in his book-length 2016 essay, The Great Derangement, “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”