Flaggelation is not Cool:

Wake me when American Literature stops its self-hating whining and fatalistic nonsense. At the ceremony for the National Book Awards (rundown of winners here), Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who I expect better from and should be ashamed of himself) all warned us (set your faces to cringe) that “The serious novel may be in serious decline.” Never mind that Norman Mailer hasn’t had a contemporary thought since the Johnson administration, or that Morrison has decided to conveniently overlook the explosion of interest in poetry and the written word happening in African-American communities across the country or that Ferlinghetti, a half-century resident of San Francisco, has ignored his adopted home’s thriving literary culture. All of which leads me to place the blame at the feet of…

1) The Internet. The biggest evil the arts have known since the Nazis burned books on the Opernplatz.

2) “Desperate Housewives”, who has drugged America into watching the idiot box on Sunday nights instead of doing what they were before: Quizzing each other on Proust.

3) Junk Food, which has made everyone so fat and lazy they can no longer lift a book like The Naked and the Dead and thus forced them to deny the First Commandment of Contemporary Literature: Length equals merit.

4) Podcasting, which, er, because I don’t know what it is must be one of those new fangled distractions that keeps the kids from buying my books.

5) Arrogance and self-hatred. It serves exactly no one to moan the death of literature and propose no solution to the contrary. It is the height of arrogance to assume the decline happened safely after you had published greatness, collected your awards and been crowned a legend.

Miles Davis was perhaps the greatest musician of the 20th century. Not once did he complain that jazz was in peril, nor did he ever blame contemporary culture from shifting their interest away from him. At the end of his life, he was making music with Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy and many other hip hop artists his contemporaries were cursing for killing the spirit of jazz.

Morrison, Mailer and Ferlinghetti should learn from his example. Theirs is an unwiliness to accept change, to see how the world could be different than the one you grew up in and to engage in labored denial of history. The novel has been declared dead since the day it was born. And when, in that 300 years, has it happened?

Their scolding is not wanted here, on the battlefields of contemporary literature, where many of still have the audacity of hope. Shame on all three of them for spitting on it.

• Category: Reading and Books