A.S.Byatt interview

Q:In a recent interview, American novelist Philip Roth predicted that the novel would become extinct as a genre in 25 years at the most. As one of the most important novelist of our age, what is your opinion of his prediction and how do you foresee the future of the novel?

A:I don’t see the novel disappearing. It represents a prolonged communication from one person to one person and it uses language, still the most complicated method we have devised for talking to each other. It may well change its format -- become electronic, for instance -- but it will take a long time for it to disappear. All the blogs and Facebooks we now have are in fact evidence of our need to read and write. Commonplace novels may be replaced by these methods. Good novels will still be needed. And good writers will need to pay attention to the blogosphere and to Twitter, et al., to see what is happening to the medium.