“People like Passaro, of course, tend to think that anyone indifferent to the latest "smart” authors must be vegetating in front of the television, or at best silently mouthing through a Tom Clancy thriller. The truth is that a lot of us are perfectly happy with literature written before we were born—and why shouldn’t we be? The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac’s Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says ‘Toyota Celica’ in her sleep. This is not to say that traditional realism is the only valid approach to fiction. But today’s Serious Writers fail even on their own postmodern terms. They urge us to move beyond our old-fashioned preoccupation with content and plot, to focus on form instead—and then they subject us to the least-expressive form, the least-expressive sentences, in the history of the American novel.“
Absolutely.