You would think that with the sheer volume of publishing and the growing number of smart, well-educated people in the world there would be a new masterpiece produced every week. My thesis is that the conditions aren’t quite right for that sort of blossoming. But who knows? Even great writers can’t judge which of their works is the most important. Flaubert couldn’t understand all the fanfare about “Madame Bovary.” I think George Eliot considered “Romola” her masterpiece – it’s nearly unreadable. She also produced volumes of unreadable (and unread) poetry. So, you’re right: there’s always hope. It’s hard to know just when or how a masterpiece will be born.

It’s true, as Preeta suggests, that this particular community thrives on the faith that some excellent writing is being published today and will continue to be published around the globe, hopefully for some time to come. That may sound like a raw, wide-eyed claim, but let me assert that I have no illusions about how many tepid, pointless, unreadable, or just plain bad books are also created every year. (I love Blanche Boyd’s two questions she’d ask about a piece of writing: Is it good? and Does it matter? — the latter question inspiring a whole host of others.) And so this site seeks to rummage through the fray, find some really good books, and talk them up.

And this *is* (or could be) a good blog for talking about what dissatisfies us about contemporary fiction, what’s missing or what we think is missing. I agree that George Eliot is a genius (and hard to top), and I have a special place in my heart for the 19th-century novel. But I think there are plenty of contemporary novelists, American ones included, producing excellent work today. Some even have wonderful social-historical criticism chops, like or totally unlike Eliot’s. For this particular type of novelist, however, I’d look beyond Moore and Sedaris (who is, to get uber-techincal, an essayist), as these writers — both of them among my favorites — usually write very much as and about (transparently or not) themselves; they’re certainly social critics, too, but from a very personal POV.

As I consider my own favorite authors from the 20th and 21st centuries – particularly ones who write about “big” issues – I find most of them aren’t American either, but here are some wonderful exceptions: Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. And pretty much everything by Deborah Eisenberg, just inside-out. If you haven’t, I heartily recommend you read Lauren Groff’s recent story collection Delicate Edible Birds; I think the first story owes a lot to Moore (who was her teacher), but the rest are utterly her own and branch out in all kinds of surprising directions. Oy, I have had so many crises of faith about books, particularly novels – thinking suddenly that all of them are terrible, that I can’t bear to read another – but every book I’ve listed above was powerful enough to bring me back around. And (in typical American fashion!), with every conversion, I’m more nutty about them than before.

In some respects, I don’t belong on this blog at all. I’ve soured on fiction in general, and think that as an art form it peaked in nineteenth-century Europe. The only American writers I’ve come to enjoy are Lorrie Moore and David Sedaris, neither of whom display the depth or intelligence of George Eliot, who herself issued a few notable clunkers.

The world we live in today is so complex and lacking in collective history that it may take a superhuman writer to tie everything together in a way that once seemed possible.

As a quick P.S., I’d also like to say that Fiction Writers Review is a site created and maintained for the sake of discussing and promoting the books we love as writers and for writers — and to encourage other reader-writers to explore them. As adherents to the “do no harm” policy, we don’t publish negative reviews (though we do publish mixed/critical ones). So our site isn’t the best place to vent about disliking a living author’s work. And as FWR’s editor, I have low personal tolerance for ad hominem attacks. Period. Stick to the text, and before publicly damning it, at least read the book. Thank you.