Why I Hate Modern Fiction

I don’t like spare writing. I want detail. Extravagant detail. And lots of it. This ‘new’ lean style, exemplified by Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante is to me, and, okay, look, only to me- boring. No, let me rephrase that -Ideologically inconsistent with a Gargantuan desire and appetite for excess.

This is not a literary assessment, by the way. Like, dislike, that’s a personal choice.

There are other prettier terms for lean and spare, ‘simple and direct,’ ‘intense and stark,’ but basically this new leave-your-adjectives-at-the-door style is all the current rage. I guess simplicity can be seductive, as all the important people (agents, publishers, Influencers) feed off it, and it has infiltrated fiction at every level.

It is certainly not new, Alain Robbe-Grillet perfected the style in France, but he had an agenda, not just spare, but repetitive, circular and circumspect, he bore into the readers’s brain.

One might trace this Spartan tendency back to Hemingway, but he was verbose in comparison to what’s going on today. What followed Hemingway and his gang of Raymond Carvers, led inexorably to a style exemplified by many New Yorker writers, much of which might at least partake of the stripped down style -Ann Beattie, anyone?