He concluded: "I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out."
Parks's comments reflect growing anxiety in literary circles that the internet is eroding the status of the serious novel.
In a lecture in Oxford last month, the author Will Self said: "The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. If you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you novel also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer is no, then the death of the novel is sealed, out of your own mouth."
Parks's anxieties about the distractions of modern technology have also been echoed by Philip Roth. When his 2010 novel Nemesis was published, Roth told an interviewer: "The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach any more."
- Ikhide
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