"I think if 'Portnoy's Complaint' were written today, it would be taken as a humorous novelty," Joseph Heller said. "Today even women write books in which they happily masturbate."

I particularly liked that "even."

I was talking to the 74-year-old Heller because three works of fiction by his grizzled Jewish peers have recently come out: Saul Bellow's "The Actual," Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son," and Philip Roth's "American Pastoral." I doubt this literary equivalent of harmonic convergence has ever happened before, and though it's obviously mere coincidence, the simultaneous appearance of the Father, the Son and the Ghost Writer seemed to me to suggest a cultural watershed of sorts, or at least a chance to take stock as the twilight of the machers draws near.

These were the novelists who took over American culture at precisely the moment when American culture was taking over the world. Bellow wrestled American writing from the grip of Hemingway; Mailer, through his protean, highly uneven talent, moved the American intellectual from bookworm past activist to showman; and Roth invested American fiction with a depth many thought beyond our national capacity. They were an aggressive clan -- offensive to women, to the squeamish and, most of all, by their very prominence, to the WASP establishment. And as part of the power shift that carried the Jew from outsider to insider, for all the jangled nerves they caused among caretakers of the Jewish image, they made other American Jews -- particularly urban Jews -- proud.

But that was a long time ago. In "Humboldt's Gift," Bellow writes that Americans like their poets to die young because it makes the rest of us feel tough. I had begun to wonder whether something similar hadn't become true for novelists. These writers have left no heirs, and nearly 40 years after the youngest, Roth, debuted with "Goodbye, Columbus," we know they won't. Thirty-one-year-old fiction writer Thomas Beller met Bellow at a cocktail party in 1991 and introduced himself. "Beller?" he recalls the response, "that sounds enough like Bellow that I think I can remember it." No, mentoring is not in their make-up. Either they are still the game or the game is over.

Having grown up across the street from the West Side's old New Yorker bookstore, I can remember people climbing the treacherous stairs in search of the new Bellow, the new Roth, the new Malamud (Bellow dubbed their troika Hart, Schaffner & Marx). You knew writers from their work and the black-and-white photograph on the dust jacket. That peek-a-boo was all you got. But how do such literary lions play now that fiction readers are addicted to memoirs? As Bellow might put it, you'd have to be a fool not to realize the literary racket has changed. In 1964, Esquire ran a map of the literary universe that placed the Partisan Review in the "red hot center." Twenty-five years later, Esquire updated the feature, with ICM agent Amanda "Binky" Urban where the Review had been. Today it would have to be "Oprah."

Still, the machers have shown remarkable staying power in our cultural imagination, outlasting not only their contemporaries but changes that have altered beyond recognition the vast literary and cultural machine that created them. Literacy rates have plummeted, the Web competes with television for scarcer and scarcer free time, universities that gave shelter to novelists after the magazine fiction market disappeared are out of money, and women have come to dominate not just publishing, but the means -- bookstores, talk shows, college courses -- by which authors' reputations are made. This would seem like a death sentence. And yet, a book by Norman Mailer is still an event. The question should perhaps be, then, not how much these male writers have lost, but how well they've come through. They are routinely portrayed as static or even reactionary talents in a swirling cultural cauldron, but in truth Mailer, Bellow and Roth have shown a keen ability to adapt, to stay current, to remain, in that favorite '60s phrase, relevant. Compare them, for example, to Heller today. For that matter, where is Susan Sontag?