The Death of the Novel?

If you will recall, we broke into our close reading of James Wood's How Fiction Works to remark the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet. We felt the connections were obvious—especially that crack about each generation creating its own 'realism' all the while denouncing previous 'realisms'. Another reader, Stephen Marche, comments on the puritanical connections over at Salon. Short version: R-G = too radically austere; JW = too 19th Century. Marche argues for that lively tradition drawing on such diverse sources as Defoe, Sterne, et al.