In Sunday’s New York Times, David Brooks bemoaned the decline of great novels – and “big-time” novelists. And he put the blame on writers, for not being audacious, and progressivism, which encourages conformity.
It was astonishing to me that Brooks, a man who makes a living from his wits, failed to cite the obvious: the post-literate world we now inhabit. Books, and perhaps especially novels, no longer hold the place in the culture that they once did; they were supplanted years ago by TV. There is, and always will be, a small core of readers, but the vast majority of Americans do not look to novelists for profundity, solace, or even entertainment. When people meet – including Boomers, who grew up in the last great age of reading – they don’t talk about the books they’ve read but about the shows they’ve watched. And no generation of writers, however audacious, is going to change that.
