No one can tell 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-through rate of most novelists' works is almost negligible. The writers I know have printed thousands of novels, most of which 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 difficulties. 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" readers' eyes. They just want to indulge their aesthetic taste, play with technology, play with language, play with mysterious, profound or lofty spirit, dream of futures trading, and let readers in the 22 nd century get a good price for their "masterpieces" from a pile of old paper. Since the 1980s and 1990s, there have been many 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 the end of their rope in form and technology. Novelists still go their own way, struggling in the dark and infatuating with each other. Except for a few people who eat by comments who are crustily applauding or cursing, the readers are gone. I don't know whether to sympathize with or admire the novelist's embarrassing living condition. Cao Wenxuan, a writer and professor of Peking University, said: "The deep pain and resolute rejection of the story in modernist novels is nothing more than a bolder cutting and dismemberment of the story." As a result of cutting and dismembering the story, 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 recent life, they go further than Joyce and Faulkner step by step, but they are said to be closer to the essence of life. Novelists follow the logic that life is only a fragment, plain is true, and life is full of trivial, complex, profound and internal tension. Novels should express these fragments, but we must forget the traditional "typicality" and "conflict". In modern "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 an 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 own hobbies. They want to be clear at a glance, and after reading it in one breath, they are easy to feel hearty, thrilling and inspiring ... Readers seem to need the story of the novel as always, and they need those tense, meaningful and interesting fragments to form a touching story. Foster thinks that story is "the highest element in a very complicated novel style", and novels can't completely get rid of stories. After discovering that it is futile to get rid of stories, western modernist novelists tend to return to stories, while some of our novelists are still trying to "commit suicide" 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 interests, and how to tell it more creatively and with a wider readership, instead of blindly pursuing any breakthrough in novel concept and form.