Peter B Kyne; ASM Hutchinson; Gertrude Atherton; Edna Ferber. The names mean anything to you? Me neither. All four featured on the end of year US fiction top 10 bestseller lists in the 1920s. These are just four random authors; I could have chosen almost any others. There were only three names I recognised for the whole decade: Edith Wharton, Thornton Wilder and Erich Maria von Remarque.

It's a fair bet that literary critics were shaking their heads at the amount of dross in the bestseller lists and lamenting the state of the novel back in the 1920s. It's the kind of thing critics like to do. These days we often think of the 1920s as one of the highpoints of the novel, with practitioners such as DH Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, F Scott Fitzgerald and Herman Hesse. So you can put money on some critics saying the first decade of the new millennium was the heyday of the novel in 90 years' time. The really interesting question is what books and authors they will be citing in evidence.

First things first: the novel is here to stay. Whether we're downloading books on to a Kindle or turning pages of a book is an entirely different argument: the hunger for good storytelling has lasted for centuries and shows no signs of going away. The issue is quality. And I would argue the quality is still there; it's just not always that easy to find it.

Here's why. The sheer number of books published these days makes it impossible for any reader to keep track of what's being written; couple this with bookshops dying on their feet and their reluctance to stock anything but the most popular titles and it's a no-brainer to assume that a few very good reads never leave the publisher's warehouse, let alone pick up a review.

Which brings us to hype. No publisher – or writer, for that matter – can bring themselves to admit that writers are human. They have their off years and they have their on years. Instead, each new book comes with a blurb – frequently reinforced in the media by endless column inches – that brands it as both "the most important work yet" and a "guaranteed bestseller". And the reader buys it and wonders what all the fuss was about.

You can't really blame publishers. They are in the business of selling books, not preserving the state of the novel. And hype does sell. Or at least it stops other books that haven't been hyped from selling. So while the public appears to have unlimited choice, it actually has very little.

Take the last three months. Are Martin Amis and Ian McEwan really two of the most important writers of the decade? You would certainly think so to judge by the hyperbole their new books have generated, yet Amis hasn't written anything particularly good or different since the 1980s. The Pregnant Widow may be better than Yellow Dog, but then it could hardly have been worse. You can make more of a case for McEwan. He is a good writer. But one of the best? I'm not so sure.

Creative writing courses also haven't helped. They may be big business for universities and wonderful therapy for graduates – though I can't help feeling if you want therapy you'd be better off seeing a therapist – but they have had a negative effect on the reading public. All they have done is to make many more mediocre writers just competent enough to get published. I can usually sniff out a book that's been written by a creative writing student within a few pages; there will be no plot to speak of and each sentence will have been polished so many times it will be dead.

Some critics like to moan about the proliferation of ghosted novels by celebs crowding out the market. Get over yourselves. These books are what they are; no one pretends they are literature and if serious writers want to reach a bigger audience then they should make more effort to write books people want to read. This isn't dumbing down; it's a simple matter of having something to say and saying it well.

I'm often amazed at the number of novels that substitute style for substance. Books that seem to have no discernible plotline or arc; books that resolve themselves in an unconvincing catharsis; books that have been written just because the writer is able to string a few sentences together.

Here's my creed. A good novel should be readable. And yes, I will risk heresy by saying Ulysses is massively over-fetishised. Why would an author not want to be understood? It should also have a good storyline; a whole load of generalised thirtysomething angst isn't enough to sustain a reader's interest. The dialogue should be accurate: people should talk as they do in real life. You wouldn't believe the number of writers who make their characters say the most ridiculously convoluted things. Actually, you would. The book should be edited; this used to be a given, but now some writers' egos won't allow it. And above all, the book should have a big idea; something to say about the world beyond the basics of the story.

These books do exist. It's just a matter of knowing where to look. Critics often get very sniffy about genre writing, but I believe that's where many of the best novels are to be found. One day, John Le Carré's thrillers of the late 60s and 70s will be recognised as 20th-century classics. But there are good writers around. Interestingly, William Boyd got far more attention from the media when he was more obviously writing literary fiction; his most recent book, Ordinary Thunderstorms, was largely overlooked because it read too much like a thriller but, in my opinion, it was easily one of the best books of the year.

Then there's Stieg Larsson. A man who wrote gripping stories against a background of political corruption and violence against women. And sold millions. The great novel is very much alive and well. It's just not always where you're told it is.

• Thanks to DurkheimwasRight who suggested this topic and author in our fourth birthday open thread