Novelists as aphorists, essayists, moralists

By window_verse

I really love stuff by Proust, George Eliot, Faulkner, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and a few others where the books just casually toss in big chunks of commentary on life, people, art, war, society, whatever—right in the middle of the story, not instead of it. I keep wondering why modern fiction seems to have moved away from that. Are there any current authors who still do it, or is it basically gone?