Prepare the Sick Bed

Prepare the Sick Bed

Contemporary fiction continues to suffer from incurable earnestness. So many books use the cloak of "literature" to justify overwrought emotion, absence of humour, flat prose, dull characters and, let's face it, plain, overall boringness, I'm thinking of diagnosing a pandemic of book flu.

And yet, these very symptoms appeal to reviewers and prize juries -- why is that? Why do we demand so little life in what we read? Why do we reward books that have nothing going for them other than their own affect of seriousness?

Again, no answers, just questions, questions, questions.