Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English. In this scene from Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947) a man meets a woman at a Fourth of July picnic.

He saw her running in the women's race, her arms close to her sides. She was among the stragglers and stopped and walked off the field, laughing and wiping her face and throat with a handkerchief of the same material as her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near her brother. She came up to them and said, "Well, I used to be able to run when I was smaller." That she was still not accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman, and a beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very tender toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the contestants in the three-legged race hobbling over the meadow. He noticed one in particular, a man with red hair who struggled forward, angry with his partner, as though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he could wipe out only by winning. "What a difference," Leventhal said to himself. "What a difference in people."

Scenes that show why a character falls in love are rarely convincing in novels. This one works beautifully, and with none of the "evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today. The syntax is simple but not unnaturally terse—a point worth emphasizing to those who think that the only alternative to contemporary writerliness is the plodding style of Raymond Carver. Bellow's verbal restraint makes the unexpected repetition of what a difference all the more touching. The entire novel is marked by the same quiet brilliance. As Christopher Isherwood once said to Cyril Connolly, real talent manifests itself not in a writer's affectation but "in the exactness of his observation [and] the justice of his situations."

It's easy to despair of ever seeing a return to that kind of prose, especially with the cultural elite doing such a quietly efficient job of maintaining the status quo. (Rick Moody received an O. Henry Award for "Demonology" in 1997, whereupon he was made an O. Henry juror himself. And so it goes.) But the paper chain of mediocrity would probably perpetuate itself anyway. Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!"; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket. A reorientation toward tradition would benefit writers no less than readers. In the early twentieth century it was fashionable in Britain to claim that only a completely new style of writing could address a world undergoing an unprecedented transformation—just as the critic Sven Birkerts claimed in a recent Atlantic Unbound that only the new "aesthetic of exploratory excess" can address a world undergoing ... well, you know. For all that Georgian talk of modernity, it was T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by the "presence" of the past, who wrote the most-innovative poetry of his time. The lesson for today's literary community is so obvious that it may seem patronizing to bring it up. But if our writers and critics already respect the novel's rich tradition—if they can honestly say they got more out of Moby-Dick than just a favorite sentence—then why are they so contemptuous of the urge to tell an exciting story?

Moyer Bell and other small publishers are to be commended for reissuing so many older novels. It would be even more encouraging if our national newspapers devoted an occasional full-page review to one of these new editions—or, for that matter, to any novel that has lapsed into undeserved obscurity. And modern readers need to see that intellectual content can be reconciled with a vigorous, fast-moving plot, as in Budd Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) or John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934). Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (1941) and Roy Fuller's The Second Curtain (1953) are British psychological thrillers written in careful, unaffectedly poetic prose; both could appeal to a wide readership here. By the same token, many of the adults who enjoy Harry Potter would be even happier with Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (1946-1959) if they only knew about it. Suspense fans would be surprised to find how readable William Godwin's The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is. Americans should also be encouraged to overcome their growing aversion to translated fiction. To discover Shiga Naoya's A Dark Night's Passing (1937) and Enchi Fumiko's The Waiting Years (1957), two heartbreaking classics of Japanese fiction, is to realize how little we need a white man's geisha memoirs.

Feel free to disparage these recommendations, but can anyone outside of the big publishing houses claim that the mere fact of newness should entitle a novel to more of our attention? Many readers wrestle with only one bad book before concluding that they are too dumb to enjoy anything "challenging." Their first foray into literature shouldn't have to end, for lack of better advice, on the third page of something like Underworld. At the very least, the critics could start toning down their hyperbole. How better to ensure that Faulkner and Melville remain unread by the young than to invoke their names in praise of some new bore every week? How better to discourage clear and honest self-expression than to call Annie Proulx—as Carolyn See did in The Washington Post—"the best prose stylist working in English now, bar none"?

Whatever happens, the old American scorn for pretension is bound to reassert itself someday, and dear God, let it be soon. In the meantime, I'll be reading the kinds of books that Cormac McCarthy doesn't understand.