Mostly I don't find this review very gripping, playing as it does with the whole "end of [x]" genre, in this case about the novel, but then it has these two paragraphs which seem to me both significantly right and worth mulling over:

The art of writing, too, has undergone a metamorphosis. Once a way to engage with reality, it has become primarily a status-seeking activity. The idea of 'being a writer' nowadays seems more important than learning a craft, perfecting a talent, or honing a worldview.… The wannabe writer now offers himself to the ideological architects of the media and academe, providing fodder for their deterministic interventions in a discourse increasingly more about remaking the world than investigating it.

Meanwhile, reality as presented through the media takes on an increasingly supra-fictional quality, daily trumping the most far-fetched efforts of even the most creative artists. The conventional novel came to seem strait-laced and slow, and only genre literatures like crime, horror, and sci-fi seem capable of sustaining the heightened attentions of a reading public strung out on escalation.

The idea, somewhat hidden here, that I like, is that good writing has always been "a way to engage with reality."  And that what has challenged is a failure of nerve on the part of most of us, and also the emergence of a massive "alternative reality" via the media.  This does seem right to me, and worth considering.  For some reason we seem to have a hard time wearing our Orwell glasses: Too much of the time our writing, and our judgment, reflect presuppositions more than observations, talk about what we think rather than what we see.  

Maybe the most interesting approach has been that of what James Wood called, disparagingly, "hysterical realism."  The world is pretty surreal, for sure.  How do we capture that surreality?  Do we out-bid it for extremity?  Or do we try some other way?  

While I find a great deal of contemporary fiction caught in a mannerist show-boating, asking people to think that is beautiful, or that is ideologically correct! rather than that is true, I do think there are some good writers out there.  Ben Lerner strikes me as really insightful.  Zadie Smith is always out-reaching what seem to be her presumptions in her quest for reality.  Who else?  Do we need many more?  Feel free to let me know if you have names.

In the meantime, be well.