Dennis Lehane on literary fiction

From Dennis Lehane's appreciation of Richard Price (on the National Book Critics Circle blog):

I was in graduate school when Clockers came out. It was right at this point that I was growing disillusioned with where a lot of (though, by no means all) American literature seemed to be heading. It felt as if so many of the alleged "literary" works being produced at that time were excessively insular, navel-gazing affairs, more often than not centered upon some disaffected, overly verbose young asshole or his/her late-middle-aged counterpart, an academic of some sort having an affair with a student. The third type of book that predominated was the "homage," which involved grafting the plot of a Shakespeare play or some similarly pantheonic work over a contemporary setting, thereby proving the writer had read his/her classics and was therefore worthy of our attention and esteem but also wholly overlooking the small fact that he/she was too devoid of originality to tell a story that he/she had actually, you know, created.

He then goes on to say that Clockers is "one of the few Great American Novels in the North American canon."

Comments

[John McFetridge]

And don't stop with Clockers. FREEDOMLAND is also a great novel as is SAMARITAN.

[Dirt]

Wow. Lehane has put in 1 short paragraph everything I've felt was wrong about 1990's "literature."

[John Dishon]

"...but also wholly overlooking the small fact that he/she was too devoid of originality to tell a story that he/she had actually, you know, created."--A genre writer complaining about unoriginality? Genre writing is defined by its formulas/tropes; it's just how well you execute the forumlas, right? So what's the difference between a thousand Romeo and Juliet stories and a thousand PI stories?