“The simple but profound problem with many novelists, as James Wood reads them, is that they have failed to realise the true nature of their chosen form; they are artists who have not yet learned how to reply to their calling. Stendhal once famously compared the novel to a mirror being carried down the road, innocently catching all the angles of life. By contrast, Wood argues, contemporary novelists too often treat their pages more like flypaper, ready to cling on to any randomly floating bits of cultural debris.”