Of course, this is tosh. The novel has been "dying," assorted snobs have harrumphed, for at least a century--oh, since Henry James perhaps. (Fuddy-duddies in Athens said that the Epic died with Homer; then along came Apollonius Rhodius with his epic about Jason and the Argonauts.)

With all due respect to the Naipaul view, it seems to me that the novel--or the writing of fiction--is in robust health. More people do it than ever did before, and while quantity is never a reliable measure of quality--especially when it comes to words, or yarn--telling stories is still a human passion.

So one is tempted to say that Sir Vidia might here be a tad blinkered and that maybe what he really means is that nobody writes novels as good as his own. But I shall not, in response, do more than invoke Gratiano from early on in "The Merchant of Venice":

I am Sir Oracle,
And When I ope my lips let no dog bark!

One might say that a reliance on oracles, or on a class of persons who made oracular observations, was the mark of primitive society, a prescientific genuflection to a source of power with direct access to the gods. Here, the Oracle at Delphi--Ground Zero in such matters--is Exhibit A. (Subtract 'p' from Delphi and you have the very place where Sir Vidia predicted the novel's death; he would, I suspect, enjoy the symmetry.)

Yet it wasn't only primitive societies (in a chronological sense) that lived by reference to the oracular. People with no political control over their own lives often look for interpretive signs--What will befall us next?--in the corridors of power or in the twitchings of a tyrant's mustache.

According to the historian Robert Conquest, "you had to look at all the little clues to find out what was going on"--or what was going to happen--in Stalin's Russia. "Where is so and so standing in the photograph? How far is he from Stalin? How far was he in the last photograph? Why was his piece in the paper three paragraphs longer than the other man's?" You looked, you huddled together with your wife, you panicked.

Sir Vidia says the novel is moribund and we scratch our chins and murmur. Alan Greenspan speaks of "irrational exuberance" and the markets tank for a bit. Imagine the stampede if Tom Wolfe were to say: "The men's suit is passé." Or if the frugal Warren Buffett took to ordering large brandies at lunchtime.

We sophisticates, it seems, need seers, too--who look beyond our limits, who discern order and dispel disorder (aesthetic or intellectual). But like stone oracles, many become what we invest in them, as we cease to test their objective powers. One has to wonder, for instance, whether Henry Kissinger would be "Henry Kissinger" if he were not called upon, at every world crisis, to pronounce on The Meaning of It All.

Of course, the more cryptic the pronouncement, the more thrilling it seems to us, like a sort of abstract music. (Nietzsche's "death of God" remains the gold standard.) The skeptical test, here, is this deflating question: What if I weren't supposed to believe in this man? How much truth would his thoughts carry then?

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