Film: the new novel.

Surveying with one glance the current state of Western literature--and by literature, I mean novels, poems, and plays, but also the traditional nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of philosophy--compared to what it looked like in, say, the first half of the twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall quality.

Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, which starts off promising, but reads more and more like an outline for a novel; ...