How is Fiction Doing?
Mailer's contribution to a New York Times Book Review symposium of novelists on the future of the novel; he predicts novelists 'will break out of our cysts, infiltrate other disciplines.'
“How is Fiction Doing?,” a New York Times Book Review symposium (14 December 1980) in which Mailer joins John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, and others to prognosticate on the novel’s future. Though the form is “cut off on one flank by film, and on the other by history (which has become more novelistic than the novel),” Mailer predicts that novelists “will break out of our cysts, infiltrate other disciplines, inhabit new epistemological modes … and produce flowers never glimpsed before.”