Slate has a fun roundtable between authors Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart on the state of the novel in the digital age [via Fimoculous]. Shteyngart, who’s stopping by tomorrow night for a conversation about his novel Absurdistan, is decidedly less upbeat than Kirn on “the Age of the MySpace Novel.”

In this fragmented, distracted, levitating new world, no wonder you and I are unsure of our place as writers of fiction. According to a recent poll, 81 percent of Americans think they have a book in them. (Of course, few of these citizens actually feel compelled to read someone else’s novel.) And if you put together the daydreams, misrepresentations, regrets, jeremiads, nostalgic reminisces, and so on that an average educated American now types into her computer’s Outlook program during the course of a year, you will most certainly get a 250-page volume. And that volume just might be deemed publishable. So many works of fiction I read these days are composed of bits and pieces, of various forays into this and that, of cleverly crafted narratives that function not as descriptive set pieces but as collectors and accumulators of information and desire, potent combinations of Madame Bovary and Wikipedia.

[Absurdistan: A Conversation with Gary Shteyngart]