Less than a hundred years ago, D.H. Lawrence called the novel “the highest form of human expression so far attained.” Jane Austen said that it had nothing to recommend it but “genius, wit and taste.” Today, even novelists themselves—maybe especially novelists themselves—are unlikely to make such large and unironic claims in favor of their art. It is no coincidence that many of the most exciting novels to have appeared in recent years—Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, Ben Lerner’s “10:04” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?”—have been distinctly un-novelistic, featuring protagonists who share many biographical details (and sometimes names) with the authors, and substituting the messiness of experience for conventional plots. Such “novels from life,” as Heti’s book was subtitled, reflect the authors’ exasperation with fictional artifice. “Just the thought of writing fiction, just the thought of fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous,” Knausgaard wrote in the second volume of “My Struggle.”

These books made David Shields’s “Reality Hunger” (2010) seem prescient. An earnest “manifesto” against the traditional novel (which Shields finds “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless”), “Reality Hunger” galvanized many critics and novelists alike. Shields argued that novels are often flashes of “narrative legerdemain”; he calls for “serious writing,” in which “the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.” He particularly prizes the lyric essay, which forsakes plot and character entirely.

If aspects of “Reality Hunger” were familiar, refrains on old arguments (in fact much of the book consists of direct quotations from other books), Shields’s points are worth considering again, both because he is laudably serious about what literature ought to aim for and because his ideas about the novel are so firmly entrenched in contemporary literary culture. Shields’s belief that the traditional novel is dated and that the way forward—aesthetically, if not commercially—lies in non-novels or at least non-traditional novels now represents the fashionable position in the literary world.

I confess that I share Shields’s dissatisfaction with much contemporary fiction—and I too like the recent spate of “novels from life”—but I think he has homed in on the wrong target. The novel form isn’t the reason so much contemporary fiction seems uninspired; for that, we’d do better to consider other causes, of which there are plenty: an emphasis on documenting social conditions and modernity over the study of individual characters, a post-Freudian tendency to lean on secondhand psychoanalytic ideas as a cover for incomprehension or shallowness, a corrosive commitment to niceness at the expense of the kind of social and moral judgments that used to be at the novel’s center, MFA programs, to name just a few possibilities.

As a novelist who doesn’t feel especially inclined to experiment with form, I admittedly have a dog in this fight. And yet I hope it’s not only defensiveness that urges me to defend the form against an indictment that in some iterations seems more trendy than rigorous. Before we rush to condemn whole-hog the novel’s supposedly obsolete conventions—the well-worn apparatuses of plot and character—we ought look at how they function and what they do well.

For Shields, the fact that characters are made up is problematic on both pragmatic and moral grounds. He feels that novelists, presiding god-like over the world of their creation, enjoy a “spurious authority”; memoirists and essayists, on the other hand, are honest about the fact that their thoughts and even their projections as to other’s thoughts are just that. But this framework can easily be reversed. The autobiographer or essayist might be said to have a spurious authority because he or she can fall back on the claim to be speaking “truth”: if readers express skepticism about anything in the text, the writer can defend it by saying that this is how it “really” was, or at least how it seemed to him. The novelist who invents characters, on the other hand, depends entirely on whether those inventions are convincing.

But why bother, Shields wants to know. “The world exists. Why recreate it?” In fact, made-up characters have two key virtues. The first is variety. If authors wrote only about what they knew firsthand, from self-reflection, literature would exclude the kind of people who are not, by temperament or circumstance, likely to sit down and write books. Consider Vronksy, from “Anna Karenina.” (Because Shields’s argument isn’t leveled against middling novels but against the form itself, it makes sense to look at one of the most successful examples.) This is Vronsky’s state of mind when a friend teases him about his pursuit of Anna:

He knew perfectly well that there was no risk of his becoming ridiculous either in Betsy’s eyes or in the eyes of all fashionable people. He knew perfectly well that in their eyes the role of a disappointed lover of a girl or of single women, in general, might be ridiculous; but the role of a man pursuing a married woman, who had made it the purpose of his life to draw her into an adulterous association at all costs—that role has something grand and beautiful about it and could never be ridiculous.

Shields assumes that fictional characters are merely authors’ “surrogate selves,” but like many fictional creations, Vronsky—callow, dashing and professionally ambitious—is not that. Creating him required on Tolstoy’s part qualities other than introspection: attentiveness to the peculiarities of social life, the ability to conceive the thinking of people morally and psychologically unlike oneself, and fairmindedness. Channeling people other than the author also makes possible the presentation of multiple consciousnesses, enabling novels to capture some of the populous cacophony of real life. This is one of the strengths of the form. “Other people,” as Zadie Smith wrote in a critical response to “Reality Hunger” in “The Guardian,” “that mainstay of what Shields calls the ‘moribund conventional novel,’ have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the ‘lyrical essay.’ ”

A second advantage of character is perspective. When Tolstoy gives us Vronsky’s thoughts, they are of course inflected by Tolstoy’s own point of view; what is disclosed is two-fold: Vronsky’s way of thinking and Tolstoy’s critique of Vronsky’s way of thinking. That’s a distinction we see even more clearly here: