The problem is they write too well, our literary boys. There’s hardly a novelist now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you’d care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on an old Philco hi-fi would quiver just before it settled on the spinning 33.3. Without being witty, they know what humor looks like on the page; without being wise, they know what shape an insight has. Though their shared culture seems limited to 1970s politics, 1960s pop music, and the batting lineups of the 1950s Yankees, they know how to work up other topics for one another. They know how to handle a gangster’s strongest curses and they know how to capture a prima donna’s lightest mood. They have a literary instrument ready to say almost anything. And they have almost nothing ready to say with it.
Our age, in other words, is an age of the literary academy, and it has all the virtues and all the vices Matthew Arnold promised when he urged English literature to build itself a counterpart to the Academie Franfaise. Its virtues are a teachable consensus about what constitutes good writing and a single-minded, unsmiling concentration on the art of it all. Its vices are harder to describe precisely: a certain ennui that infects all highly stylized human activities, a prose that takes the form of revelation more often than it actually reveals anything. But if we had to give our literary age a name — a slogan and a title with which to pose it against all other literary ages — we could do far worse than dub it “Richard Ford” and remark that its latest work, Independence Day, just became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer prize and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award.
