I know too much about the judging process to endorse any decision by the Pulitzer Prize Committee—including the year they named me a finalist. But I do find it amusing that the literati are so upset that Columbia University chose not to choose winner among the three finalists in the fiction category.
Current literary fiction is an abomination.
There are, no doubt, many exceptions. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve leafed through highly-touted, award-winning books of contemporary American fiction at my local bookstore only to be appalled at their political irrelevance, pretentious writing styles and complete lack of insight. The louder the praise from middlebrow establishment types like the critics at the New York Times, the lamer the prose.
Maybe it’s because I grew up admiring the muscular prose of Anderson and Hemingway and Sartre and Fitzgerald, but the phrases “turn of phrase” or “lyrical writing” have become signifiers that scream: Do not buy me.
Thank God for nonfiction. I wouldn’t read books without it.
2 Comments.
Life is too short to read fiction.
Ted,
The New York Times Book Review has been unflagging — unflagging, I say — in running ads for their Jill Abramson’s book (The Puppy Diaries). That should count for something. Shouldn’t it? But still you give the Times’ “middlebrow” status? I think you’re being too generous.