Did the plot ever really die?

Reading Lev Grossman's story Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard in the Wall Street Journal, one will be entitles to be afraid. Be very afraid. The plot is coming back to the novel! Of course, many will go ... er ... did it ever die ... when? According to Grossman it was with Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, amongst other's. (So that's why they wanted to ban the books, they couldn't understand them!)

He writes: "A good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It's what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it's also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them. Plot makes perverts of us all."

Really?! Hmm. I have to confess, I have always liked some plot in my novels, but not at the expense of good writing and good characters. I guess there was a time when I would plough through a hard book because it was supposed to be good. Strangely, this appears to be an affectation of 20th century Anglophone literature. The Europeans and the South Americans appear to have gotten over it after Kafka, that is, and seem to know how to combine good story-telling with good writing. (They are really not mutually exclusive, you know.)

Lev Grossman says, "All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction ..." Or, you could read Carlos Ruis Zafon, Saramago, Arturo Perez-Reverte, or any of the South Americans -- they still have the plot.

Wall Street Journal