The novel is dead – again. And this time, it's women who have murdered it

The novel has died again. I’ve been baited into reading yet another obituary, this time written by the Secret Author (a “former professor of English and creative writing at a leading British university”) who laments, in the Critic magazine, the decline of serious novels about middle-class morals and God, in favour of those focusing on “identity politics”. Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith are cited as the writers who symbolise this supposed decline. It did not escape my notice that these writers happen to be women, while the literary God-botherers of the past have tended to be men. Over the years, the novel has died more deaths than a cat. It has died from loneliness, and it has died as a result of its own stupidity. This time, it has died because women have murdered it.

There’s something about Sally Rooney that drives men wild, and not in the ways they are used to being stimulated (an attractive young woman’s place shouldn’t be an enthusiastic profile in the New Yorker. This was not part of the plan). It’s all very well dismissing her work as “very simple stuff with no literary ambition”, as Will Self did last year. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the state of literature. But writing can be a petty business. A writer who claims never to be envious of other writers is as much a liar as one who claims not to care about sales. And Rooney, who has not only hit the publishing sweet spot of the literary and commercial crossover but is also very good at what she does, has provoked much jealousy.

Then, humming along in the background like a broken fridge you’ve put on Gumtree, there’s the identity politics culture war. Whenever a woman or a person of colour deigns to make art that reflects who they are (as all art has a tendency to do), it is “identity politics”. This is often framed as some newfangled trend, when really it has always been with us: it’s just that the culturally dominant identity has historically been white and male. But because it’s been the default for so long, people have trouble seeing this as explicitly political. Contrary to what you might hear about the decline of the great white male author, he’s still cloaked in too high a regard for some to see he has as much of an identity as anyone else.

Which is why his reappraisal is a good thing. No one wants to “cancel” John Updike, for example, but we have been treated to some intelligent, witty re-readings of him, courtesy of the critics Patricia Lockwood and Claire Lowdon. A younger woman! Reviewing an older man in such esteemed pages! It shouldn’t be novel, but it is. “He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday,” writes Lockwood. And: “[Updike’s books] perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.”

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This comes at a time when the publishing world is engaging in difficult conversations about race and class, subjects that both remain seriously under-represented in literary fiction. “Fashion dictates that modern books about class can only be written from the perspective of those oppressed by it. How one would love some modern-day Waugh or Mitford or Raven to write a novel in which the fount of all moral goodness flows from a country house in Gloucestershire and the lower orders are portrayed as shiftless and venal,” writes the Secret Author, seriously misreading Waugh. “Alas, no one in these enlightened times would dare to publish it.” Or perhaps it is less a case of daring and more of a case that such books simply wouldn’t sell? There have been rather a lot of them, and publishing is a business, after all. If you are an editor looking for writing that can be called “fresh” (an adjective beloved of publishing houses) there remains an untapped mine of unheard working-class experience next to that much-depleted country house quarry.

It’s tiring, all this, because no one wants to make the Great White Male Novelist extinct, they just want him to shift up a bit and make some space for everyone else. Readers who truly love books are hungry for a range of perspectives. Julian Barnes and Graham Swift can sit alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rooney, Andrea Levy and Ali Smith. We are seeing more brilliant fiction in translation. One of the best novelists working in the world today, Elena Ferrante, being a prime example. Last month I took part in a Zoom discussion panel organised by her publisher to celebrate her new novel, The Lying Life of Adults. In the righthand box on my screen, readers from all over the world greeted one another, brought together by their admiration for this author. She is, of course, much beloved by women, because she has “written the feminine”, as feminist writer Hélène Cixous termed it, unlike any other living author. But men read and admire her too, and were keen to stress that fact.

So on the one hand, you have these wonderful, inclusive experiences, where readers feel genuine joy at the increasing range of fiction that is on offer, and continue to agitate for more, and you have columns lamenting the rise of identity politics, when really what they are lamenting is the rise of a writer who is not like them. Is the novel dead, or is the kind of novel that you like simply not getting the attention it once did? Over a decade ago, Zadie Smith wrote that, “In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.” It seems strange to be saying it in the middle of a pandemic, but these are healthier times than some might realise, and the novel isn’t dying. It’s been feeling a bit peaky, and certainly a little pale. And now it’s getting better.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author