The novel, like civilization, is from time to time pronounced dead, and yet, like civilization, somehow keeps going.The novel died first with Fielding, then with Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, died again with Proust, and with Joyce, and, most recently, with Hemingway. A pride of friendly critics has always stood ready to be the novel’s pallbearers: F. R. Leavis, inThe Great Tradition,praised the novel so highly and defined it so rigorously that its death seemed unavoidable. Other critics brought slightly jollier news of the novel as moribund, ailing, or irrelevant. Lionel Trilling, for instance, suggests that the post-World War...