A "leading novelist"

What is a "leading novelist"? To me, it's a novelist with whom I have a personal relationship. I read this perambulating piece in last Friday's NYT and encountered the suspect phrase at the end. The piece is really all about establishing a status and rank, and that's precisely where it fails; because these people don't rank at all to you or me, and they all have almost no status to most others. The novels you know, the novelists you know: that is what ranks, who has status. The New York commercial mills have seen to that, if inadvertently, through what they've missed, in trying to make their money. They're making less of the stuff every year--mercifully.

Lawrence Durrell once wrote that the purpose of fiction was to give an average chap a few clues about how to live. Even while acknowledging that to do so is presumptive--does an average chap need clues on how to live?--I concur and even think that that's the whole purpose of writing in general. But if it's so, where does the "leading" part come in? It comes in the way a reader walks away from a text transformed. I love Barthes too, but--does someone read academic hieroglyphs, i conversazioni, &c. (why "le"?) and become transformed, ready to live life with the new clues in pocket? I think not. They read others--people who offer captivating characters, challenging plots, all with admirable style--for that.