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I have been in several different writers’ groups. I have been the only man in almost all of them. Still, much of what I have learned about writing, editing and criticizing fiction I owe to the women in those resilient little bands committed to long effort with few rewards. My gratitude to them knows no limits save for one: their reading recommendations.

Invariably someone in the group will rave about the latest book they have read. They swear I will love this one, despite my inability to appreciate the pure genius of the last half-dozen writers upon whom they have heaped praise at our meetings. I must develop an eye for subtlety, literary critics say. I have to give the story time to unfold or the character a chance to develop. The problem is usually with me, the reader, not with the sensitive and skilled author of the literary novel of the moment. They have been touched on the shoulder by a golden muse while I stagger about in the muck of impatience and stifled imagination. Their only problem as the writer blessed with literary talent beyond question is that their perfect and delicate work has fallen into the hands of a Neanderthal like me.

A possibility not often entertained by some of my writing cohorts or the righteous judges of literature ensconced in cushy New York Times reviewer gigs is that these books may just suck. From the undisciplined and unfocused poetry disguised as novels by authors such as Toni Morrison and Annie Proulx to the agonizingly slow pace and belly-button staring self-absorption of Jonathan Franzen I am given to understand that the problem lies with me. Never mind that Alice Sebold’s groundbreaking twist of having a dead narrator was creative ground well trodden when William Holden told us his story face down in a pool on Sunset Boulevard. Never mind that Ann Patchett commits every egregious structural error at the beginning of bel canto for which any new writer would be rightly chastised, turning what should be an exciting premise into a series of dull digressions into characters she is unable to make us care about.

I’m not the first or the only one to notice that the emperor has no clothes—B.R. Myers has said it as well as can be said in his tiny book A Reader’s Manifesto—but I think I have hit upon a couple of the why’s he did not address. Most notable is the emergence of graduate level, MFA writing programs that have sprouted like noxious weeds all over the English speaking world. No longer does the daydreaming English major with no other skills have to graduate and face the hard compromises of the working world. They may take refuge for another few years in an obscure MFA program at a tiny college, wrapped in the comforting delusions that support such places—that they have real talent unrecognized by the plebeians by whom they were previously surrounded, that here literary potential is revered and nurtured, that with perseverance and unwavering adherence to their own unique vision, they can be the next truly great writer. That English departments previously fallen on hard times now have an additional and reliable source of revenue fed by the feverish dreams of the young and hopeful is a cynical observation that never makes it into the glossy brochures touting illustrious resident authors and useful connections to publishing houses.

What are these eager young MFA’s to do when their magnum opus fails to find a publisher upon yet another anxious graduation? Use those cultivated connections to become proof readers, slush-pile gatekeepers, literary critics in those media outlets that still have them, junior literary agents, assistant editors, and eventually, if they don’t get distracted again by their own literary ambitions, acquisition editors at publishing houses. Trained in what is and what is not “literature” at these MFA factories, their own sensitive proclivities supported and reinforced by the feminine writing culture that dominates these programs, they now constitute the filter through which most aspiring writer’s manuscripts must pass. And if you are a male writer in the vein of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, or Graham Greene, if your writing style is straight-forward and unadorned with the unnecessary or ornamental, if it is focused on serving the story rather than the writer, you will, if published at all, be relegated to the category of popular fiction, unworthy of serious review or literary recognition. You will be squeezed into an existing genre whether your work belongs there or not and marketed on that basis. Thus do writers of the quality of Larry McMurtry, whose literary ability cannot be ignored, have books like Lonesome Dove wedged into the western category because his style is not “literary.”

So, novels are sorted into commercial or literary and rarely are the two allowed to overlap. This artificial and arbitrary selection process, that I believe finds it’s genesis in the ubiquitous MFA programs as much as the avarice of the new titans of publishing, is responsible for and encourages the “split personality” noted by Motoko Rich in her New York Times article of November 26th. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing has temporarily ceased the acquisition of new works by it’s editors due to economic hardship. This while the Hachette Publishing Group paid bonuses to it’s employees. The difference between the two? (And to judge by the tone of Ms. Rich’s article, a difference unfathomable to her) The former has a stable of “commercial” authors who sell copies in the millions, the latter is a champion of experimental and “literary” authors who hope to sell 15,000 copies in hard cover.

This split between commercial and literary writing has been encouraged and exacerbated by the world view embraced by graduate writing programs. I find little mystery in the decline of literary reading in general (and the steeper decline in literary reading among men) in the NEA report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Most of the new novels being offered up are either shallow, plot driven and forgettable commercial fiction or the overly long, poetical blathering of undisciplined minds revered as “literature.” Is it any wonder that literary reading is in decline?

Of particular annoyance to me is the writing style and habits picked up by male authors in MFA world. To slot a particular kind of “literary” novel about what are assumed to be women’s concerns, from a woman’s point of view and most often written by a woman, in the chick lit category as distinct from other forms of literary fiction is a distinction without a difference. To this Neanderthal’s eye, nearly all literary fiction published these days is chic lit, whether written by men or women, about war or shopping, it all reads the same way: slow, over-written and needlessly, not to mention ineffectively poetical.

I rarely buy new fiction anymore. I go back and re-read what’s on my shelf, or take a book by a favorite author out of the library that I have not yet read. I do browse the bookstores for new releases now and then or find a book that has recently enthralled my writers group. I pick it up and read the first two or three pages. I almost always close it and put it back on the self, once again disappointed. If I buy a book at all it will be something of Hemingway’s or Graham Greene’s I haven’t read, the complete stories of Jack London or some such. If the big houses stop publishing these old timers, they’re gonna lose me, too.