Why Write Novels at All? Last year, I found myself mildly obsessed with a cache of YouTube clips, featuring the novelists Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Nathan Englander at a 2006 literary conference in Italy called Le Conversazioni. Part of what interested me, in a gate-crashing kind of way, was the backdrop: midsummer on the Isle of Capri, with flora aflame and a sky the color of Chablis. Another part, inevitably, was watching Wallace with the knowledge that he would kill himself two years later. Mostly what I kept coming back to, though, was how lighthearted, how loose - how young - these writers seemed here. It's not that they weren't already an accomplished quintet, with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award to their credit. But in 2006 the gravitational center of Anglo-American letters still lay back on U.S. soil with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy and John Updike and Toni Morrison and Philip Roth - those towering figures who, according to a Times survey released earlier that year, produced the greatest American fiction of the previous quarter-century. By comparison, Le Conversazioni might as well have been "The Breakfast Club" and Capri a weirdly paradisiacal high-school library. Five years later, in 2011, the islanders finally overran the mainland. Franzen's "Freedom" was ubiquitous, and just when it threatened to drop off the best-seller lists, the posthumous "Pale King" by Wallace stepped up to take its place. All year long, Zadie Smith was issuing a running commentary on world letters from her post as the house critic at Harper's, and through the fall, it was hard to tune in to NPR without running into Eugenides - or to miss his giant billboard avatar looming over Times Square. It may seem like a journalistic contrivance to read this group's collective ascent as evidence of an aesthetic trend. If you don't hear people throwing around the term "hysterical realism" anymore, it's because any net broad enough to catch "The Virgin Suicides," "The Corrections," "On Beauty" and "Infinite Jest" is going to have a hard time excluding, say, DeLillo's "Angel Esmerelda" or much of Philip Roth. On the other hand, several of these younger writers have actively invited us to see them as standard-bearers, holding forth in essays and interviews about "today's most engaged young fiction" and "the novel's way forward." Is there a sense, then, in which Le Conversazioni's class of "06 really does represent a bona fide school? I had my doubts, too. But then I picked up Eugenides's new novel, "The Marriage Plot," an exuberantly bookish book that offers the clearest account to date of his cohort's collective aspirations and anxieties. There is, it turns out, a unifying thread; it's just not a matter of form. The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer "How should novels be?" but "Why write novels at all?" The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the "80s promulgated the notion of "cultural capital": the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is - the novel very much included - the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that "refined" tastes have. It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of "transcendence" must have seemed 30 years ago. You don't have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieu's book "Distinction" to feel how thoroughly a lower-calorie version of its ideas has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. As the music critic Carl Wilson argues in "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste," his book on Celine Dion, "In early 21st-century terms, for most people under 50, distinction boils down to cool." And the Internet has rendered the competition for cool more transparent than ever. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, "like"-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.