One promising development in the culture today is that mainstream critics are more and more growing tired of postmodern fiction. After years of servile praise for these aimless, messy, ungainly, nihilistic, often obscene tomes that lack real plot, narrative, characterization, etc., critics are saying Enough! The New Yorker review of Divisadero, the latest novel by Michael Ondaadtje, whose tedious English Patient was made into an equally tedious film, concludes this way:

Many readers respond to Ondaatje’s anti-novelistic aesthetic. But it is frustrating to read continually against the grain of expectations, and it is even a little annoying to be expected to pick out the patterns in the metaphors, to be obliged to trust that there are patterns, while the author looks on silently. “The novel has been quite slow in picking up what the other arts are doing,” Ondaatje has said. “For years they have been doing things that are much more suggestive, much freer of chronological sequence.” The impulse to experiment is worthy; one wants it to yield more than suggestion.

Translation: This book was an aggravating bore and wasn’t worth the time it took to read it.