Last week, I came across this article in the New York Observer, which effectively raises the question ‘do novelists have a duty to write more about contemporary social issues?’

Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of American literature and theory at the University of Illinois, was quoted as saying on a public panel that fiction should be more like US TV show The Wire, which for five seasons accurately portrayed various aspects of life in modern-day Baltimore, from the drug trade to the school system to the print media and so on. In an essay previously published on bookforum.com, Michaels argued that memoirs, historical fictions (for example books on slavery or the Holocaust) and novels about individual identity were effectively redundant. These, he claimed, would never succeed in producing great art as we need it now: