Nowadays, no one can tell exactly how many people often read novels, but one thing is certain: the readership is shrinking, as evidenced by the poor circulation of novel books and literary periodicals. The click rate of most novelists' works is almost negligible. After printing thousands of novels by writers I know, most of them are distributed to people who don't read novels at all through some rich units.

In any case, novels still occupy a certain share in the cultural consumption market, and novelists may have only two choices: hanging up their pens or constantly exploring the market according to the needs of readers in a difficult situation. In the commercialized society, in the era of emphasizing the audience, and today when everything is linked with the click-through rate, novelists don't try their best to "seduce" the readers' eyes. They just want to indulge their aesthetic interests, play with technology, play with language, play with the mysterious, profound or sublime spirit, and dream of futures trading, so that readers in the 22 nd century can get a good price for their "masterpieces" from the pile of old papers.

Since 198s and 199s, there have been various narrative experiments and text games in avant-garde novels, trendy novels, post-modern novels, new state novels and new generation novels. Today, they are almost at their wit's end in terms of form and technology. Novelists are still bent on their own way and struggling in the dark, and they are infatuated with each other. Except for a few people who rely on comments to eat, they are crustily applauding or cursing, but the readers are missing. I don't know whether to sympathize with or admire the novelist's embarrassing living condition.

Cao Wenxuan, a writer and a professor at Peking University, said: "The deep bitterness and resolute rejection of the story by modernist novels is nothing more than a bolder cutting and dismemberment of the story." The result of cutting and dismembering the story is that the novel has become a "fragment" and the reader is faced with a pile of building blocks without drawings. From "original ecology" and "new state" to novels that strengthen the "fragments" of life in the near future, they go further than Joyce and Faulkner step by step, but they are said to be closer to the essence of life. Novelists follow such a logic: life is just fragments, plain is true, and life is full of trivial, complicated, profound and internal tension. Novels should express these fragments, but we must forget the traditional "typical" and "conflict".

In the modern meaningful "fragment" novels, you can't see the complete plot and characters, only some vivid fragments of feelings, emotions and thoughts. For writers, it is indeed a kind of innovation, exploration and rebellion, a brand-new thinking and transformation of novels, and critics will be excited. But ordinary readers don't bite the bullet and look for guilt. Readers rely entirely on their interests and hobbies. They hope to read at a glance, read in one breath, and easily feel hearty, soul-stirring and inspiring ... Readers seem to need the story of the novel as always, and need those fragments full of tension, meaning and interest to make a touching story. Foster thinks that story is "the highest element in the very complex body of novel", and novel can't get rid of story completely.

Western modernist novelists have found it futile to get rid of stories, but they have a tendency to return to stories, while some of our novelists are still trying to "kill themselves" on readers. I think an excellent novel with a large number of readers must rely on stories. The task of a novelist is how to tell a story more brilliantly, how to tell his own style, thoughts and aesthetic taste, and how to tell it more creatively and with more readers, rather than blindly pursuing any breakthrough in novel concepts and forms.