For some time now, I’ve found myself uninterested in—and even annoyed by—a lot of contemporary literary fiction. As a lifelong lover of literature, this is not a confession I ever expected to make. But most of the novels that win prestigious awards and attract effusive reviews are starting to run together. The line between so-called literary fiction and popular fiction has always been porous, but the only difference I now perceive is in the choice of formula the writers opt to follow. Most literary fiction plots are as formulaic as any of those embraced by the most unimaginative genre fiction writers.

Many of these authors seem to have graduated together from the same MFA program. The narration is invariably rendered in the present tense. Action is scrupulously avoided. The characters are unhappy people living empty lives filled with misfortune. I can imagine the assignments in Creative Writing: The Novel. Assignment #1 might read: 

Start with ordinary upper-middle-class, college-educated characters placed in a comfortable urban or suburban setting. Fill 350 pages. Stop writing. Ensure that nothing has happened between the beginning and the end. 

This is the “Write What You Know” approach. This formula has, you might have noticed, become quite popular in independent film as well; if the course were Beginning Screenwriting, you could simply replace the “350 pages” with “ninety minutes’ worth.”

Assignment #2 might look something like this:

Take an ancient Greek myth or a centuries-old narrative poem you had to read in high school. Identify an -ism. This will usually be sexism, but unacceptable views about homosexuality or race or ethnicity or anything else will work as well. Then, retell the story from a contemporary point of view so that whoever was victimised in the original version emerges empowered and victorious.

The advantage of this approach is that the writers are allowed to appropriate the victimhood of someone from an identity group other than their own. And since such a story will be set in a mythical past, it also allows the protagonist to enjoy a happy ending—something that would not be acceptable in a contemporary setting. This formula will be a sure winner for the inexperienced novelist: anyone who knows anything about classic literature (that is, anyone who went to high school before about 2015) and has sampled a couple of these current novels can churn out an endless series of revisionist texts. Some writers appear to be doing just that.

The third assignment is the most sophisticated, as well as the Most Likely to Win a Major Award:

Tell the tragic story of three generations of the [foreign-sounding name] family as they endure unrelenting hardship and inherited trauma in [real or invented foreign-sounding country]. Try to cover as many types of tragedy and suffering as possible: war, natural disasters, disease, domestic abuse. Pile it on. You may end your novel there, but if you choose to, you are allowed to add a further plot element: the remaining family members manage at last to get to a developed Western country, preferably America, only to find the paradise they wished for was an empty promise for people like themselves.

This is the assignment that a vast number of contemporary novelists seem to have chosen to revisit throughout their careers. Even if you’re not familiar with contemporary fiction, you may have encountered a version of this plot in award-winning movies (The Brutalist, for instance). I’m sure filmmakers will begin following the novels even more closely, once they realise that extending a story across several generations provides an opportunity for yet more unmitigated misery.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? A couple of weeks ago, my sister was clearing out her bookshelves. For the past few years, her husband had got into the habit of buying prize-winning novels: Booker Prize short-listers, National Book Award nominees, Pulitzer Prize winners, and so on. Neither my sister nor her husband ever got around to reading them and the bookshelves were long past containing them. She asked for my help in choosing which to keep and add to her lengthy reading list. She loaded up some boxes and brought them to my house, where we proceeded to go through them, reading the cover descriptions together. By the end of an hour, we were laughing so hard, we could hardly read the blurbs through the tears. Over and over again we found the same heavy-handed plots, the same earnest tone, the same tedious and tendentious traumas. She chucked out the lot.

The Purpose of Imaginative Fiction

“What’s it about?” is usually the first question we ask when someone recommends a new book, and it’s the wrong question.

QuilletteElena Shalneva

The marketing of these books is part of the problem. Even if a work is quite different from its successful predecessors, the publishers will aim to make it sound the same. Why argue with success by admitting to creativity or originality? But too many of the books, especially in the third category, really are the same. It’s not that I don’t sympathise with suffering. I know that people all over the world are experiencing hardship. But I also know that desperation is not the sum of all literature-worthy lives, and that victimhood is not a laudable goal.

In a brilliant essay for the April 2025 issue of Commentary, Irina Velitskaya explains the Russian concept of poshlost, which includes the intense, sentimental, and paternalistic desire to empathise with the imagined suffering of unknown victims. This impulse seems to dominate much of today’s literary fiction. Ideology has seized the gatekeepers of serious literature—writing instructors, editors, publishers, and writers themselves—and whole swathes of the human experience are being neglected as a result.

Most of the modern fiction to which I have been drawn was written decades ago. But I have enjoyed a few recent examples as well, and many of them share a somewhat similar storyline. In these novels, a likeable character (a feature that already differentiates these books from the prize-winners I’ve begun avoiding) is faced with a life that appears hopeless, but with a combination of quiet resilience, help from unexpected sources, and quite a bit of luck, our unlikely hero manages to find contentment. The protagonist might not be entirely ordinary, the setting may be dull or it may be exotic, and the plot may include some unusual twists and turns along the way, but the general narrative is a familiar one—familiar not only from fiction but from life. Above all, the characters do not identify themselves as victims or survivors or sufferers of irreparable trauma. Nor does the author.

Maybe the protagonist is a Russian count sentenced to life inside a Moscow hotel when the Bolsheviks take over (A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles). Maybe we’re entering the highly restricted world of an African-American girl whose grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman, insists that she marry a much older man she detests (Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston). Or perhaps we meet an overweight, unsuccessful sad-sack who has just moved to a fishing village in Newfoundland (The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx). In a comic version, the main character might be a beleaguered creative-writing professor at a mediocre university, whose novels are unsuccessful, whose wife and more recently, girlfriend, have left him, whose colleagues don’t appear to respect him, and whose students find him boring (Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee trilogy).

What hope do any of these characters have? What hope can we have for them? That’s what these stories will lead us to discover. When help unexpectedly arrives, it is as varied as the protagonists and their situations. A communist bureaucrat’s nine-year-old daughter, a mysterious young drifter given to gambling, the editor of a small newspaper that reports local shipping activity, a low-achieving college student, a pitiful dog named Rogaine: whatever it is, the source of assistance is likely to be as surprising to the character as it is to the reader. Each story includes its share of heartbreak and struggle and loss. That is all part of life too. But the characters’ lives are not reduced to a series of trauma-inducing tragedies. Instead, they manage to achieve a small victory. The redemption and rewards they reap will be modest. They won’t become perfect, but they will become better. And so will we by reading their stories.

As a number of commentators have noticed, contemporary culture’s preoccupation with trauma and victimhood has helped to create a generation of anxious young people unable to deal with the realities of everyday life. I’ve been describing fiction written for adults, but a good part of young-adult fiction has followed the same dismal path. And young readers are far more likely to be negatively influenced by these narratives saturated with human suffering. In an effort to persuade adolescents to adopt a social-justice agenda, literature’s gatekeepers have managed to contribute to the spread of self-identified victimhood.

That doesn’t mean I insist on narratives that assure their readers all will be well. Sometimes, terrible experiences lead to further suffering and no redemption is possible. And yes, some novels have presented that harrowing reality honestly, and not by following formulas while fishing for prizes and praise. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, about his father’s experience during and after Auschwitz, is brilliant and heartbreaking. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which deals with the appalling suffering produced by the caste system in India, is a beautiful and devastating novel that can only end in despair.

But survival isn’t the only story, not even for those who have escaped a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust. My mother, as it happens, was one of those. She died recently at the age of 97, and as I was writing her obituary, I realised that she had actually lived the kind of life featured in my favoured novels. Maybe I had subconsciously connected with them for that reason. In any case, these books and their authors seem to understand something more than how to exploit the latest literary fashion—they understand something about life itself.