>Surveying with one glance the current state of Western l

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>Surveying with one glance the current state of Western literature-and by literature, I mean novels, poems, and plays, but also the traditional nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of philosophy-compared to what it looked like in, say, the first half of the twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall quality. Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, which starts off promising, but reads more and more like an outline for a novel; or Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, which is so self-consciously affected that it reads like a caricature of Faulkner; or even a master like Thomas Pynchon, whose Mason & Dixon goes in and out of focus, one is inevitably perplexed by the awkwardness of the performance.

>While it is true that more books are being published than ever before, a close inspection of the average level of quality offered by most publishers reveals them to be the literary equivalent of fast food: trashy Barnes and Noble-type coffee table books with more pictures than words; computer and business books; cookbooks; graphic "novels"; pop fiction bestsellers. Worse, the books that pass for "real" literature, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Toni Morrison's Paradise or Arthur Gulden's Memoirs of a Geisha, are really just frauds masquerading as literature, rip-offs from great novels of the past displaced to modern, or exotic, settings. The handful of real artists out there practicing real literature-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie-grows ever smaller, while the frauds, and the public's inability to discern the difference between them, proliferate.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Le5BNvv6pO4J:http://0-literature.proquest.com.fama.us.es/searchFulltext.do

How does it feel to be a bunch of frauds?