Is the news replacing literature?

Lee Siegel in The New Yorker

These days, the conventions of art seem quaint and tidy. Zadie Smith, borrowing the phrase from the novelist David Shields, has written about her “novel-nausea,” an impatience with literary artifice. Her frustration is shared by novelists from Tim Parks to Naipaul, Roth, and Munro, the last three of whom have given up writing fiction altogether. (It could also be why the autobiographical novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, which read like direct transcriptions of reality, are so popular. “Just the thought of fiction,” he writes, “just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.”)