A coffee table is a good place to start. Always more intrinsic to a room and to living than one might think, the coffee table can become the depository of the living room but it need not be just a depository. Put it in another room and see what happens. This reminds me of a place I used to work 

Sometimes there was a big lecture, sometimes two smaller classes, one being a watercolor class for which we draped the floor with a large white canvas so the carpet did not get any paint on it, because then the big lecture would get angry and sullen and seem less majestic even though it wasn't that majestic to begin with. So you see, novels are like the big lecture, which lasts anywhere from 6-10 weeks, depending upon the size. Novels don't want any little flecks of paint on their surfaces, they want readership. But readerships only accommodate 
so many little classes, little classes that must use the wall divider to forget the oncoming of the big lecture.

To be sure, in the watercolor class, and in the memoir class next door taught by someone a little flaky, but who loves books, the object is more often than not a staff of flowers, staff in the sense of faculty, a large faculty of flowers that don't show up that well under track lighting, so everything turns out a little more baroque than the instructor would have liked, the instructor who actually remembers the names of interns and spiky flowers, core members of the faculty. Now these things are not thinking about the big lecture but the big lecture has sort of touched the room because the room itself is designed for big lectures, then modified for the smaller classes. This has import. This means one thing in particular and that is who will be challenged and who will never be challenged. The pain of never being challenged. That pain is piety. And if piety is a pain, then one would hope theirs is some relief. Furthermore, it is up to the memoir class, or the watercolor class, to inform the big lecture of what it is missing, which is basically everything that a person who loses smell is missing. Under the right conditions, ideas can offer little in the way of helpful obstruction. 

The other ideas, resumed: Fiction needs to be a coffee table though. It supposes Itself the couch or the recliner but it should not be that big, in its own concept, because pride goeth before a concept and we need more writing inside the novel. If a third party is going to be in something and I assure you all novelists are third parties, look at their sentences, which want to be there, sure. Oh happy distance, it is better to be a coffee table in the bedroom than a coffee table in the living room or, do not participate.  Novelists, throw your bread to the birds and walk away. You don't have to eat it with them.