What is certain is that the literature of the late 1990s lacks the tutelary presence of a major writer or writers. But literature flourishes none the less. Writing could be said to be living off the accrued fat of the twentieth-century. The novel at least has little of the intellectual bite of recent work produced in the Americas.

It also seems to be taking its time in assimilating the import of the substantial changes that have taken place in the world since the end of the Cold War, since the fragmentation of the Soviet Empire. In the 1990s the novel has remained the most accessible, the most discussed, the most promoted, and the most sponsored literary form.

Literary prizes, such as the annual Booker Prize, founded in 1969 on the model of the French Prix Goncourt, have helped to stimulate an interest in new fiction which cannot be anything but healthy. The novel has properly reflected modernity’, the changes in how we think, move, and have our modern being, and the fragmentation and chaos which are supposed to characterize contemporary life.