When novelists reach the end of their stories

Whether their material has been exhausted, or they have, very few writers reach old age at the top of their game - Rick Gekoski  -  guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 February 2012 

Henry James: Late bloomer. Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

When I was doing my DPhil on Conrad, one of the seminal texts, (now, I suspect, largely unregarded) was Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. I was innocently struck by his thesis that Conrad, after an apprentice period that covered the first couple of years of his writing life, then had a golden period (from 1897–1911) in which he produced a series of masterpieces, after which two indifferent books followed (Chance and Victory) and then a distinct falling off into the later works. This seemed to me, at the time, admirably observed and illustrated, and it did not occur to me for a moment how banal the argument actually was.

Maybe I hadn't yet read enough yet? Achievement and Decline? That's what novelists do, and the trajectory of Conrad's career – for Moser was largely if unremarkably right – can serve as a model for the career arc of most novelists. Think of Conrad's contemporaries. DH Lawrence? Perfect. Virginia Woolf? Yup. Thomas Hardy? Sure enough. EM Forster? Saw the problem coming and headed it off at the pass.

Or think of ours. Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift – that excellent generation of novelists whose best work is now, pretty clearly, behind them. And, yes, I know who won last year's Man Booker, and was glad of it. But it's not Flaubert's Parrot is it?
Gekoski's full piece at The Guardian.