Reading Fiction

I was once an avid reader of fiction.   I gobbled novels.  Ate them.  Lived and breathed them.  So as not to drown,in books, I became selective.  I  relied on critics  to tell me what was worth my time and money.  But sometime in the eighties something strange happened.  I'd buy one of the critically touted books and before I had finished the first chapter I'd feel my mind wandering.  I'd start flipping pages.  At about chapter three I'd put the book down and never pick it up again.  I lowered my reading standards.  I began to read novels that weren't literary enough for major review, but they didn't hold my interest; ingenious plotting couldn't atone for the lack of elegant prose.  Unread novels, like discarded boxes of cereal, began to pile up on all the tables in my house.  

If I had to point to one thing that killed my fiction-reading addiction, it might be the new American novel, a creature that was born and bred in the word swamp of  writing workshops, where the institutionalized writing of fiction has created a model that sucks out originality and depth and quirkiness.  Now, I love beautiful writing.  I love metaphors.  I love adjectives.  In my mind a well-crafted sentence is a thing of beauty.  But beauty that keeps looking in the mirror is a bore, and piled-on metaphors and untethered adjectives and endlessly repetitious writing is a cheat.  (Reviewers do their part in measuring the quality of a novel by listing and quoting its brilliant metaphors .)    

 Why can't we have elegant writing and narrative surprise and mind-blowingness in the same book?  Why can't we have fiction that doesn't tell us the same thing over and over and over merely to fill out the pages but instead knocks us over the head with delight?   

Wait.  What is that noise I'm hearing?  Is there dissension in the writing-program business? Did someone just say that they can always tell a book that has been workshopped?  Is there a new model on the horizon?