They evolved from epics and fables, became diaries and letters, then a pastiche of stories and essays--serialized and fragmentary. They grew into documentaries and psychological allegories, Once revered as social documents, they are now more often grist for motion pictures and TV. Now novels may be going the way of poetry, a form more practiced than appreciated.
Novelty has always been the essence of the novel. Perhaps that is what the form is lacking now.
Recently, on a PBS program called "The Open Mind" the editor of the New York Times Book Review declared that there had never been as many competently written novels as there are today. This would be good news if the novel were a table or a chair. Competence is what you look for in brick-work, plumbing or a tax return, not a work of art.
The modern novel found a vital pathway with Andre Gide, JP Sartre, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and The Beats. These and others captured and perpetuated the surprising and improvisational spirit at the heart of the art form.
The one story a novel can tell better than a newspaper, a TV documentary or a film is an individual's exploration and discovery of personal truths. A fantasy or action novel can always be outdone by motion pictures and animation. The historical novel will always be candied history, science fiction is never as instructive as a science text, and a novel about society will never be as authentic as a book on sociology.
But a novel about one person's experience and journey--physical, psychological--cannot be duplicated or surpassed in any other literary form. The current tension between the novel and the memoir--and the greater popularity of fictions camouflaged as memoirs over the straight memoir underscores the continued appetite for the novel of the individual life and the intrigue and glamor of the lives scrupulously examined but generally unseen of uncelebrated people .