Contemporary Novels are Impossible

So notes Graham Swift in the Guardian.

From the article...

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about "the contemporary novel" where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon. But the novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly "of now" is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the "now" with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished. Nonetheless, the idea of the novel that's wholly of now persists. There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.

When we read novels of the past we're apt to think that they depict a world contemporary to them – that what is Dickensian about Dickens involved his constantly keeping abreast of his times. In fact his novels often look back a decade or more. War and Peace, was written in the 1860s but set during the Napoleonic wars. Since one of his themes was war, Tolstoy might have chosen the Crimean war of the mid-1850s, of which he had direct experience, and he did write about the Crimea in his book Sebastopol, but that's a work of brilliant reportage. He clearly wanted some distance and he knew the difference between a novel and a brilliant report. When Tolstoy died Proust was beginning a novel-sequence which would take the rest of his life and so was never going to be "of now", and its title proclaims one of the things that the novel as a form is inherently about: the passage of time.