Is contemporary (fiction) writing getting worse?

This is part of the point that Tyson Duffy makes in his fascinating essay, “Language and Leonard Michaels.”

...since the advent of the MFA, the average quality of literary writing has become illiterate. Literary writers exiting these programs tend to write in a uniquely poor way, making extensive use of cliché and, worse, egregious misuse of English.

In conjunction with our increasingly non-reading population, our literary culture is busily producing writers with no literary sensibility whatsoever. This has brought us to a place where the average writing by a mid-list English-language writer today is considerably worse off than it was a century ago.

These days, because of this state of affairs, my wife has taken refuge in scads of obscure midcentury novels. She used to read strictly contemporary fiction, but during the pandemic she dropped the pretense and began reading discontinued domestic inter-war, largely British fiction by female authors whom the reading world was has seen fit to forget. We josh each other about our reading choices, but she is open about how these books aren’t high art, just good stories competently rendered in tolerable English, unlike the cloying contemporary stuff she has finally abandoned…

He goes on to compare a 1960 novel by Rumer Godden (whom someone has just recommended to me the other day!) to a recent award-winning work:

Why am I picking on Doerr and comparing him to a virtually unknown midcentury English writer of quiet realist literature? Because, though Godden’s excellent novel was read in the 1960s it was quickly forgotten and received little acclaim and no awards, whereas Doerr has been stuffed with accolades for his sub-literate “writing.” (He also won a Pulitzer, but let’s not worry ourselves about that prize which, as William Gass put it, “takes aim at mediocrity and never misses”). His novel was called “wildly inventive,” “engaging,” and “lyrical” by critics, and the frontmatter of the edition in stores was splattered with gobs and gobs of breathless blurbs, from The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, and a hundred others. People—critics!—loved this book.

Doerr of course has an MFA. He, apparently, reads. As do the reviewers from all the publications just mentioned. Uneducated Godden is immeasurably better from the first page—refined, thoughtful, and literate. Yet in our current context, someone like Godden gets shown the door while Doerr gets praised.

What concerns me is the lowness of the low we’ve reached. After decades in the MFA gulag, writers emerge now with no sense of what English can do and less respect for it as a craft and duty.

You can read the full essay, in all its acerbic brilliance, here. Of course, not all MFA products are like this, and one could say similarly derogatory things about folks who get PhDs in History. And yet, this does raise the question: why is so much modern fiction simply, well, unreadable?