Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Mary Gaitskill penned a meditation on writing and reading titled “Will literature survive?” for the website UnHerd. “We have fallen out of love with good writing,” the subhead laments.

Gaitskill writes, “An element of style that I especially care about is description of the world that the writer creates on the page” . . . a dead giveaway that a reference to John Updike will be forthcoming, and it was:

“More recently, in 2019, Joyce Carol Oates came to Claremont McKenna where I was teaching and did an intimate Q&A. I brought up the writer John Updike; I was teaching a novel by him which was hard for students to read partly because he was sexist and backward in his racial attitudes, but even more because he described his worlds very, very densely. He would spend pages describing what a character sees driving down a country road at night. Students had a hard time even tracking it — they could, but they had to try. (Note: at least one of them, once he got the hang of it, loved it, which was great.)

“I wanted to hear what Oates had to say about it because she’s of an older generation; she and Updike were peers. What she said was (paraphrasing again): yes, John could describe anything and everything but no one wants to read that any more, because (directly quoting) “people have moved on”/  I was really surprised by this. “Moved on”? We’ve moved on from the world we live in? How is that possible?” asks Gaitskill, whose novel, Veronica, was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.

How is it possible? Attention span? The need for instant gratification provided by 40-second TikTok videos? Whatever the root cause(s), true readers are apt to share Gaitskill’s dismay.