here is a 1991 book you may know by Don DeLillo calledthat explores a unique set of problems facing the modern writer. In that book, the reclusive novelist Bill Gray finds himself adrift from a society that no longer places the novel at the centre of the culture. A novelist in the late 1990s would no doubt recall a time when demanding fiction such as Saul Bellow’s could chart at number one on the bestseller list for 29 weeks across 1964-65, not to
