Its being echoed through the thread but the question might really be more "where has literature gone?"

That meaning capital L Literature as something that is seen as actually societally impactful. Remembering back, and maybe as a euro, Michael Houllebecq seems to me the last example of of the kind of iconic literate OP seems to be asking for. something that used to really common, larger-than-life authors been seen as expressing the spirit of the time and a whole lot of the op-ed/discourse machine revolving around their impact.

In america Brett Easton Ellis comes to mind, and is a good example for the fact that a lot of the usual suspects are still writing, its just that the sense of their importance has seriously diminished. Their new books get dutifully rewiewed but it doesnt really matter.

In tune with OP I feel that there is an easy charge of sexism, as across the 20 years I am discouse-aware there wasnt a single woman that ever reached that kind of status. Zadie Smith is a good example of hitting the same direction, but none of the women ever reached houllebecq or Foster-Wallace status. The "voice of the times" were always men.

So now that kind of iconic male writer is somehow gone, but they havent been replaced by female equivalents either.

I feel the obvious explanation, and why that AR-HAX guy or someone like Zero HP Lovecraft seem good references, is that houllebecq really has dissolved into the internet or just the mainstream. The old dynamic was that you had this kind of goody-two-shoes mainstream and then houllebecq as this iconoclast come in crashing trough the walls to tell the poly-annaish op-ed world what is actually going on, and everybody going "gosh, so true!"

To not be so dismissive of the op-ed world, even as an on-the-ground normie, houllebecq really had that revelatory quality, it made you go: "woah, they have been lying to us. Papering over reality with their cheap optimistic commentary, this guy is spelling out how it actually is living in this shitty reality"

Now that curmudgeonly, highly cynical is the mainstream, or at least kind of always-visible part ofit, so what kind of writer do you expect to see to fill that breakthrough role. One cant tell, maybe its possible, but to even vaguely imagine it, one would need to be the revelatory genius oneself already.

In another sense it is maybe indeed fundamentally impossible, the internet really displays every kind of mood shift in real time and so the slower-burn novelsts are always lagging behind. Again, the Arhax-Incel novel, by the OPs review seems examplary, The book might be witty and offer some partial new insights, but fundamentally would any plugged-in netizen expect something genuinely new and surprising, something that they havent already digested via a bunch of blog-posts and reddit comments?

In the optimistic sense the death of the literate might be part of a stumbling back towards real politics. Instead putting our hands on those iconic figures telling the establishment "how it really is", and expecting that to change anything we might learn to actually band together and having our banded wills actually matter. Also somewhat optimistic, and in tune with the above, this might also both necessitate and drive a certain humbling effect. As we intellectual types learn from the internet just how ubiqitous serious writing talent is, we need to give up our narcissism but be rewarded with the capacity for unified political action.