Too many novels these days are flat. Even the famous, the lauded, the best selling, the award winning books. Even the ones the literati love.
They are exciting, yes. Well crafted, well told, thoroughly efficient. They do a job.
But what are they about? Do you come away inspired? Or feel that you’ve just been in touch with some deep truth about the human condition?
Genre fiction is all too often focused on hitting the reader expectations, tweaking them a little but not too much. Paint by numbers.
Literary fiction, meanwhile, seems to have disappeared up its own rear end, obsessed with pretty sentences and experimenting with form – but with little or nothing to say for itself.
Where are the novels with big ideas, that set out to change the world – or at least the reader?