Reclining but not declining: Philip Roth at home in 2005. Photograph: Douglas Healey/AP.
The recent novels of Philip Roth have a funereal feel. It's not seriously plot-spoiling to suggest that the the central characters of last year's Everyman (70ish man with terminal heart disease) and this year's Exit Ghost (septuagenerian with prostate cancer) are unlikely to be available for sequels.
But, in my interview with him broadcast by BBC Radio 4's Front Row on Tuesday (and reprinted in edited transcript here), Roth shockingly diagnosed another mortality: that of serious American literature.
When the novelist insisted that a spirited denunciation of modern American culture in Exit Ghost reflected the views of his character rather than himself, I suggested that he must surely share that pessimism himself, having lived from a time when novelists such as himself and John Updike would be pictured on the front of newspapers and news magazines to an era in which the novelist who makes it to the front-cover of Time is Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code.
This time, Roth acknowledged that he felt he was living in a "dying moment" for western literature, in which the pressure not only on people's time but in their leisure time - through entertainment and communication devices - meant that the habit of reading for an hour or two in the evening, as Roth has done most of his life, has been lost. The books that readers want - typified by Dan Brown - are swift and simple, confirming the most basic assumptions about the way the world and personalities works.
What the writer said chimed with an article I'd read on the plane to New York, reporting that five of the six novels on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist have sold far fewer copies than has been the norm for recent contenders. It had also struck me, having interviewed in the last few years Norman Mailer, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee, as well as Roth, that it's almost impossible to imagine that there will ever again be such a pack of giants of American letters as this group of authors born before the second world war, to which can also be added Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller.
Of post-war US writers, only David Mamet, who's pushing 60, has come close to such widespread significance. And it seems absurd to think that Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joshua Ferris, Michael Chabon, Neil La Bute, Kenneth Lonergan and Rebecca Gilman - the award-winning novelists and dramatists of the more recent generations - could ever have the weight or name-recognition of a Roth, Mailer or Miller.
Roth is correct, I think, that this decline in the impact of serious writing results from the fact that culture is now defined only as pleasure and distraction. Although technically a book, The Da Vinci Code has no concern with the traditional functions of literature: creation of character and arrangement of words. Its sentences are simply a delivery-system for fact and fantasy. Thirty or 40 years ago, there were books that educated people read because they thought it might improve their minds; now, the purpose of books is to take our mind off things.
Britain is not, yet, quite as philistine as this. Last week, Ian McEwan's Atonement topped the bestseller lists for a second time, returned there by the movie version, and it's McEwan's On Chesil Beach that is the only one of this year's Man Booker pack to do any business at the bookshop tills. But even these novels are popular to some degree because they can be read as historical romances, far less demanding and innovative than the writer's books of the 70s and 80s.
This retreat from seriousness also extends to the way in which authors are viewed. Even 10 years ago, some of Roth's comments in our interview - about, for example, the state of American culture - might have received widespread coverage and discussion. But such is the decline of that culture that, these days, a great novelist's opinions would only be considered noteworthy if he said that JK Rowling smells or that Salman Rushdie once stole his wallet. Arthur Miller wrote three of the greatest plays of the 20th century - Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and All My Sons - but, to a Google-searcher now, he's a guy who had a Down's Syndrome kid and kept it quiet.
I feel a sense of contradiction over this because I have always been someone who reads Philip Roth and Jackie Collins and produces columns and programmes which consider both. But, paid to do it, I have the time and energy to keep both ends of culture going. In a busy, tiring world, people for whom culture is an escape from their job will understandably mainly tend to take the easy option. Now that Classic FM offers Radio 3 without the hard stuff, Radio 3 struggles to find audiences. Something similar is happening in literature. Publishing and journalism must fight it if Philip Roth's morbid prediction of literature's end is to be prevented.
