In a published exchange of letters with Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee set out a rule for his own fiction. He would not write novels in which characters carry personal electronic devices. The telephone was as far as he was willing to go, and even that reluctantly. His reasoning was not squeamishness about technology. It was that when people speak at a distance, an entire vocabulary of gesture, hesitation and involuntary signal disappears, and without it, he argued, “Dialogue … just isn’t possible.”

A Nobel laureate declining to depict the single most common object in modern life is a strange position to hold. It is also a confession about the machinery of the novel, and it explains rather more about the contemporary shelf than any diagnosis of the times.

Fiction runs on things that keep people apart. For most of the form’s history, those things were external and reliable. A letter went astray. A family forbade it. A ship took six weeks. Somebody could not be found, and the not-finding drove three hundred pages.

Almost all of that has dissolved in the settings literary novelists actually use. Two people in the same city cannot plausibly fail to reach each other now, which removes at a stroke the misunderstanding plot, the missed rendezvous and the withheld message. The ending of ‘The Great Gatsby’, as one critic has pointed out, simply would not function.

So the obstacle migrated. If nothing outside two characters can keep them apart, the only remaining barrier is the characters themselves: a protagonist who cannot say the thing, will not say the thing, or does not know the thing is there to be said. Inability to connect is not primarily a theme writers have chosen. It is the last available source of resistance in a contemporary setting, and a novel without resistance has nowhere to go.

None of which makes the wider picture imaginary. The WHO Commission on Social Connection reported in 2025 that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year, roughly a hundred every hour. Adolescent girls showed the highest rates of any group, at 24.3 per cent, while older men reported the lowest. The World Health Assembly passed its first resolution on social connection in May 2025.

Writers live in that world and are shaped by it. But treating novels as a symptom chart gets the causation backwards. Books about isolation were being written throughout the twentieth century, when the statistics looked different. What changed is not how alone people feel. It is what a novelist can now use to keep two characters apart.

There is a cost, and it accounts for a complaint many people make without quite locating it.

External obstacles can be removed. The letter arrives, the family relents, the ship docks. Interior ones cannot, at least not inside three hundred pages without straining credulity. A character whose barrier is her own psyche does not get a resolution; she gets a slight adjustment, which is why so many contemporary novels close on ambivalence and why so many people finish them feeling that nothing quite happened.

Something did happen. It just happened at the scale a self actually moves at, which is small.

Worth knowing before starting the next one. The book is not going to end with the barrier gone. It will end with somebody noticing the barrier, which in the current arrangement counts as a plot.