More than once I've suggested that dispensing with narrative is OK providing something else is put in its place, like with a load-bearing wall, and I get accused of being a stuffed shirt. I get set up as the bad guy. I don't see myself that way at all, and I don't like the arrogant little shits who say it. On the other hand I recognise this arrogance as the first step on a long journey to finding a voice. The trend in workshops, at least at a post graduate level, is towards the literary novel.
Students like to experiment, keep their options open.
They seem blissfully unaware of the crisis in English fiction. But I can't help worrying about the one working on a six hundred page novel call Death of Meaning written all in dialogue between a supermarket trolley and a satellite dish. Who knows, but publishers should shoulder a large part of it for buying in too much general fiction and losing their focus, for scrapping the Net Book Agreement and for buying in the celebrity novel. It is said of Naomi Campbell that not only did she not write her novel, Swan , but she hasn't read it either. Paradoxically the proliferation of the celebrity novel has tarnished the form, cheapened it as well as taken over valuable shelf space in the bookshops.