What most novelists write nowadays feels more like shtick to me than storytelling. In other words--in contemporary fiction, the voice of the novelist always feels so intrusive, so writer's-workshopped-to-death, so unnecessary to the story. Writers can't seem to get out of the way of their own writing these days.
Of course some literary theorists might point to "the Death of the Author" to explain all this, or the Death of Capitalism, or the Last Tortured Movements of Capitalism or something along those lines. I'm just wondering why I get no pleasure from novels these days (which I keep reading nonetheless--in search of a good story I suppose, and great characters) and I don't think it's because of the Death of the Author. But I do think the author, of novels at least, is becoming more and more irrelevant.
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