His energetic writing still charms and entertains when he’s writing about writers (”literary criticism” doesn’t quite seem the right word for it), and he’s a notable memoirist.

But his recent failure at fiction is indicative, I think, of wider failures in speculative writing in our time. The fidelity to genre is one thing- this form of Austen’s continues to creak along in the most unlikely way- and I wonder not so much that the novel isn’t dead as that other forms aren’t being born in a way that matches our experience. Do we blame the publishers for not championing genre-busters? Do we blame the MFA programs for churning out adjective-addled clones?

This problem of form is perhaps related to my chief objection to Amis story: simply put, the subject seems vulgar to me. It’s exactly the same reaction I had to the synopsis of Safran Foer’s most recent book (or, for that matter, his first). The inherent drama of the material is placed as a substitute for true imaginative work.

Is it too demanding to want work that interrogates the human condition? Must we settle for subject ripped from the headlines? I’ll say it again- it’s vulgar to look directly at this atrocity- and in hands like Amis’s, hands that cannot help but make a thing into a plaything, it’s doubly vulgar. This is right up there with the film of Flight 93.

In the company of Sebald or Coetzee, what one gets are indirect glances, and somehow, what comes across in this elliptical technique is the true enormity and horror of the human condition. There are a few younger writers carrying on this work, but they are by no means among the most celebrated practitioners at work today.