" The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we‘re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it‘ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us — we won‘t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn‘t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer‘s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one [...]

PS [...] If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we‘re talking about when we use the word ‘identity‘ has reached an end.
– Don Delillo, in a letter to Jonathan Franzen "

― Don DeLillo