How novels came to terms with the internet

Novelists have gone to great lengths - setting stories in the past or in remote places - to avoid dealing with the internet. Is this finally changing, asks Laura Miller

Back in the early 1990s, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young American novelists to find a way to come to terms with the role of television in contemporary life. He believed they were going about it the wrong way, but at least they were trying, which was more than he could say for the generation of older writers he complained about in the same piece ("E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction"). One of these, an unnamed "gray eminence" who ran a graduate workshop that Wallace attended in the 1980s, scolded his students for including "trendy mass-popular-media" references in their work. Treating of such things, he insisted, would only date their writing, pegging it as belonging to the "frivolous Now" instead of to the proper province of literature, the "Timeless".