He’s one of America’s leading critics of fiction, so is it a sign of the literary apocalypse that Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post found not ten but only two books of fiction worth including in his best books of the year list? Says Yardley,

This reflects my disenchantment with what passes for American literary fiction these days … as well as the simple fact that over four-and-a-half decades of reviewing books I’ve found it more and more difficult to write about fiction in interesting or original ways. The temptation to lapse into formulaic writing is strong, and one way to resist it is just to review less fiction.

In case you’re wondering, the two books were Bloomsbury‘s  In the Company of Angels by Thomas E. Kennedy and Olga Grushin‘s The Line from Putnam.