I was sent Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel Wit’s End (published in Great Britain under the title The Case of the Imaginary Detective) by someone from Penguin, who had noticed from my own website that I was interested in postmodern literature. She promised that this novel was about author ownership, and whether a character belongs to readers or authors — ontological questions which seem prominent in postmodern literary fiction. But the novel has left me wondering whether, in fifty years time looking back to the present, literary critics will remark that postmodernism ended when nobody noticed it any more, because it had slipped into the mainstream.