The Literary Culture

I've been having this realization lately that text as a medium of communication is dying. To say this is sad feels trite. This is an atrocity. In a recent Time article, John Updike recounts his childhood, when everything was stacked with piles of books. Lending libraries were everywhere. He even remembers when departments stores had lending libraries. Those days are gone, and our great writers are dying. Updike is 74, Philip Roth is 73, Cormac McCarthy is 72, Toni Morrison is 75, Seamus Heaney is 67, and Don DeLillo is 69. Worse yet, all of these writers are feeling more and more irrelevant. Updike's new book, The Terrorist, feels awkward and feeble. He tries to portray an 18-year-old driven to Islamic extremism, but it feels so out of touch that I had to put it down.

Candidates are interviewing for the title of great young fiction writer, but all come with gaping holes on their resumes. Dave Eggers has yet to handle fiction with grace, and his po-mo cutesiness has proven to be an enormous handicap. David Foster Wallace is perhaps just a little too dark and a little too unreadable to find an audience. I'm convinced that Jonathan Lethem is holding back on us, but only time will tell. The sad thing is that even if these writers wrote a masterpiece, no one would read it. It would languish on book store shelves, and there it would die. I wish I could turn off TVs and force us as a people to learn to read again, to find margin in our days, but I know that's not possible.