Not to march in on Fortuna's territory or anything, but this bit from Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree is too good not to excerpt. He's talking about Zoe Heller's Desperate Characters and, by extension, all "literary" fiction:
It's brilliantly written, I can see that much, and it made me think, too. But mostly I thought about why I don't know anyone like the people Fox writes about. Why are all my friends so dim and unreflective? Where did I go wrong?
Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to her house and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring at the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary nobel. I can only imagine myself, or any other character I created, saying, "Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends -- just a lot of cursing and some empty threats of violence.
That's generally how I feel, he just said it a lot better. Maybe when I'm older I'll like Ian McEwan, but for now, 40 pages of Atonement was all I could take. Meanwhile, I've read about 600 pages of Hornby in the last five days. I feel like a guy who walked out of the opera to shotgun beer in front of football. And, since I'm usually an elitist political nerd, I like getting a chance to be that guy.
