I completely agree with you when it comes to music. Most of today’s music is pretty disposable and young people don’t have access to current artists that really speak to them. When I was young, you could live for up a year with a single album by the Stones or Springsteen, or any such band that was capable of songwriting - and it would mark you for life. You understand if you are listening to that music now. You let it go for awhile and you always come back to it. If you ask any 18-year old what five albums he/she would take with them on a deserted island, they would probably have a total meltdown trying to come up with the list.

Cormac McCarthy wrote “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992.
Michael Ondaatje wrote “The English Patient” in 1992.

I think it ended in 1993 for the writers.

I completely agree with you on those authors (Eggers, et al), by the way.

I’m like Steven, in that I do enjoy a wide range of excellent books written in the last 20 years, but they mostly belong to genres and sub-genres: hardboiled detective and political novels (james elroy), global history and food history (felipe armesto), cultural history (barzun), economics and new marketing (seth godin), travel literature (paul theroux ), fantastical/post-apocalyptic science fiction (jonathan lethem, magnus mills, leguin, gibson, and others). These books lay no claim to our culture at large, but market to niches, as Godin describes better than anyone.

Great literary fiction (there actually has been some in recent times), has been pushed into a niche market, by the Reagonomics-led consolidation of publishing into big business. The New York Times Book Review is a joke. However, the idea that there remain ‘laureate’ (in the metaphorical sense) writers of literary fiction, to whom we all should at least consider paying attention, still lives on. So what does the major media feed us our appetite for great literary fiction? Half-assed shit.

Like Micheal Chabon and Dave Eggers, who rely on “niche-research”, on salt, or jewish golems in prague, OR, alternately, on hyper-real, super-duper cool characters, settings, and cool but fantastical plot twists (franzen and delillo specialize in that pony trick). Both genres utitlize 2.5 dimensional characters and both are able to pass as literature.

And that’s what displaces, more than they should at least, the great books that you know have ripped into the authors’ souls as much as they rip into yours. Get you worried, angry, furious, relieved, happy, make you long, and make you laugh with joy, or at sarcasm, or even bitterly. Any feeling. And make you understand how people connect to other people, and lie and love, and cheat and evolve. And deal with death. The real shit, man.

Literature. Greatness. You’re right — it’s not just books, it’s everything. Our culture is dying. But some great echoes of the past are still hanging around, and some seeds of the future are here and there.

Of course you can link to me.

Firstly, I DO own more recent books; usually it’s hard-boiled detective novels or dystopian fictions (and I DO love dystopian fiction) - either that, or they’re non-fiction philosophy, history or theology/anti-theology books. There’s a LOT of good stuff still being written, but like so many other things, none of it is mainstream.

In fact, I think that’s come to define modern consumer culture: the great things - the truly enjoyable things - are hard to find, not because they don’t exist, but because the market has been flooded with low-cost tchotchkes; high-volume, low-content sweetener, meant as a sort of filler to get people hooked but never to satisfy.

I’ve read it described as post-capitalism; the idea of producing goods so disposable that consumers are forced to buy again and again and again with zero-thought given to durability or quality.

Music, fashion, auto-makers, shoe-makers, literature; all of the big names have moved to the business model of the tobacco companies & street-level drug dealers.