Clearly, if public and critical interest in the novel has declined, it has done so in large part because the novel over the past decade has dramatically lost authority both as an art form and an instrument for reflecting and educating public consciousness. (p. 2)

It is much more to the point to suggest that the authority of the novel never has been and probably never can be viewed as separable from the nature and quality of the human experience which, at any historical moment, may form its central subject matter. It is even possible that the novel will be most deeply influential at those moments when it is able to explore areas of experience that are not yet completely familiar to the reading public, thus functioning in its classic role as literally a bringer of news, a discoverer of what is indeed novel. These moments will usually coincide with periods of profound social dislocation, such as the rise of the mercantile middle class out of the collapsing order of feudalism--a process in which the novel as we know it in fact began--or they may be typified by radical changes in manners and morals of the kind that tend to follow major wars. (p. 3)

In almost every sector of human experience and endeavor--in politics, education, business, sexuality, marriage, the having and rearing of children--contemporary American society is itself performing the job once performed by our novelists, stripping away layers of idealistic assumption, hypocrisy, illusions of purpose, meaning, integrity, principle, and responsibility and exposing the emptiness or the corruption or the insanity beneath.

This has of course profoundly affected the nature of life in America at this time, hence, inevitably, the nature of the contemporary novel and our response to it. (p. 9)

To the extent that they ( E.N. : i.e. most novels today) contain any realistic portrait of present actualities, they tend to dramatize not our hopes, but our feelings of generalized frustration and disappointment, not our need for transcendence, but our paranoid fear that some obscure force, some metaphysical CIA has robbed us of the means and the possibility and is bent on manipulating us in directions and for reasons we cannot understand and that nothing to do with us personally. In fact, it is a characteristic feature of some of our best and most serious fiction that in it both the ideal and the reality of individual self-discovery and transcendence as central thematic preoccupations have been replaced by a dark fantasy in which prophecy and paranoia join to project a horror of universal conspiracy and mass apocalypse. At the center of that fantasy one discovers once again the classic modernist representation of the human condition: the dislocated self no longer sustained by the structures and idealistic assumptions of the past, trapped in a demythologized and therefore demoralized present, dying a little more each day as the forces of entropy deepen and accelerate throughout the world. This is not a vision capable of giving us very much further instruction. Its meaning has been cancelled by the cliché it has become, and it has lost its former adversary function: it is no longer a heretical corrective of the pieties behind our illusions. But it is, nonetheless, a reflection, however oblique and and metaphorical, of a state of mind and condition of life we recognize as common now, even as we also recognize that one of the most frustrating features of our time is precisely that the vision of apocalypse, a relic of another age and so thoroughly devitalized by excessive literary use, should still have such pertinence to us. Yet there can be no question but that the conditions of which that vision was initially the radical expression have become more visible and seemingly more malevolent in our own age. We have, in fact, institutionalized all the famous old disaster syndromes and so assimilated them into our way of life and patterns of thought that disaster has become not only our central preoccupying experience, but our principal fantasy of salvation. ( p. 10)

... We now take it for granted--and the fact creates around us a subliminal envelope of rehabilitating drama-- that we inhabit a world in which violence of any and every kind can erupt anywhere and everywhere at any time with or without provocation or meaning. This is a world that some few of us experience every day, but for the rest of us it exists as an abstraction projected and often seemingly created by the reality-manufacturing and reality fantasizing media of television and film. Our direct experience is usually of another kind of abstraction, an urban or suburban non-community in which we are perhaps most conscious of floating in disconnection between business and home, passing and being passed by strangers in the void. Home is the place of brief refuge from the void, where family offers a substitute for community even as house functions as a frontier stockade erected against the disorienting ambiguities of existence in non-community. Business or profession provides an illusion of connection with people whose only conncection with us and with one another is coterminous activity within the same "facility" or "structure." At intervals that have grown less and less frequent with the passage of time, the separately orbiting entities of business and home may, for ceremonial reasons, be momentarily joined, and strangers from the one will be imported into the other, given food and enough drink to ensure that they will not be able to notice that they have nothing to say to one another. Anesthesia is the only possible means of coping with a situation in which nothing can be communicated among people for whom the terms and materials of communication, the shared histories and common assumptions of purpose and value, have ceased to exist. (p. 11)

... It is from society seen as a corporate entity that people now try to derive what sense they can of communal relationship and identity, and the effort has most often been made through declarations of allegiance to various political, sexual, racial or ethnic groups, membership in which is based scarcely at all upon concrete experiences and shared backgrounds (as was the case with minority and subculture membership in the past), but rather upon problems that are conceived of in theoretical and statistical terms as being peculiar to a particular group. Thus, even as personal connection is sought through identification with the group, the group becomes a collective abstraction to which relationship cannot be directly achieved and, therefore, in which further abstraction is the inevitable result. (p. 12)

There inevitably emerges a state of mind having as its base the belief that life in general is not an experience to be lived but a problem to be solved. The having of experience, from which one may or may not eventually derive certain personal answers, becomes a procedure for which methods of analysis and resolution have been scientifically formulated. This has led to a shift in the individual consciousness from a sense of being the subject of experience to a sense of being its object...

The individual has not been freed by the view that life is a problem to be solved by the right application of technological method. Rather, he has been forced to become obsessed with the technology of all his personal processes, to see them, as he sees himself and other people, as objects to be analyzed and evaluated for their correctness according to various behavioral measurements and sociological surveys. Since instinct or simply intelligence can no longer be trusted as a guide to feeling and conduct, since the precedent of the past is considered an inhibition from which we are struggling to escape, only technique is left, and it is of course in the area of sexual technique that our narcissistic preoccupations have become concentrated. (p. 13-14)