Is today's fiction irrelevant?

(Interestingly, this is the second reference to the 18th-century classic I've run into in pop culture in as many weeks. Now, we aren't in “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” territory, but I usually can go years between Shandy sightings. Is the BBC working on a costume drama?)

One quote in particular resonated with me. "Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation – Martin Amis, McEwan – leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner.”

That's exactly the opposite experience that reading a novel should bring. And it's one that too many self-consciously clever novels have inspired.

But even though we seem to have similar tastes, I'm not sold. Probably because I read an awful lot of contemporary British writers. I'll see you a Martin Amis and raise you a David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, or an A.S. Byatt. (Just a thought: Maybe Josipovici should try reading more female authors.) And if McEwan's last book didn't wow me, I'll still hang on to my copies of “Atonement” and “Amsterdam,” thanks.

To dismiss an entire country's literary output based on a few hand-picked examples strikes me as a little … easy – like aiming at somebody in a dunk tank.

The fact that Josipovici has a book coming out – “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” – doesn't help him claim the high moral ground. (And the idea that the media are behind this vast middle-brow conspiracy is pretty funny to anyone who's ever seen the online numbers for a newspaper's book page.)

As so often happens, the whole argument brings to mind a quote from “The Princess Bride.” (And anyone trying to argue that William Goldman is overrated: Stop now. You're only embarrassing yourself.) “Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?” the kidnapper Vizzini asks the Man in Black. “Morons.”

I don't actually lose sleep calculating whether today's award-winning books are as “great” as the greats of yesteryear (terrible failure in a critic, I know). It's an easy argument, because everyone can think of at least one instance where it's true. Also, many of the lousy books of yesteryear are out of print, leaving us with a, shall we say, distorted perception of the cumulative literary output. I can imagine ancient Egyptian critics of the Middle Kingdom poring over papyri and sniffing that the hieroglyphics are derivative and uninspired.

I read novels because I love the adventure and the resonance and the sense of discovery. If they make me laugh, even better. And as long as I get that, that's pretty great.

So what do you think? Is Josipovici a brave voice of common sense in a land of sycophants? And does it matter if Britain's literary greats are self-satisfied, since, if the alarmists are right, they will soon be Jeff Bezos's indentured servants, laboring in a sub-basement under the Amazon complex, with only Harriet Klausner left to critique them?

Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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