Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it isn't the latest must-read novel, complete with a prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back. In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose—"furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was"—and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.

I realize that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to the literary establishment. For years now editors, critics, and prize jurors, not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the rest of us how lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting times. The absence of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has given rise to an extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with something for every palate. As the novelist and critic David Lodge has remarked, "everything is in and nothing is out." But in fact, criticism is far more prescriptive today than it was in the first half of the twentieth century. Back then, Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were both ranked among the finest novelists in the English language and considered no less literary in their own way than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today, any accessible story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be genre fiction; at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L. Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is literary fiction --- not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respect and full-page reviews than even the best thriller or romance.