Film: the new novel.

Surveying with individual glance the current state of Western literature--and by the agency of literature, I mean novels, metrical compositions and plays, but also the traditional nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of philosophy--compared to what it gazeed like in, say, the first half of the twentieth hundred what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall quality. Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The clod Beneath Her Feet, which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, which starts not on promising, but reads more and more like an outline for a novel;