Terry Teachout writes that “it’s common to run across ‘well-read’ people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don’t, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead.” So why is that, he wonders. “Our ‘major’ writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress.”