Fiction Need Not Be Boring

I remember an old Lev Grossman piece in The Wall Street Journal which was headlined:  Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard.  But his somewhat condescending article should have been entitled:  Fiction Need Not Be Boring. Here's Grossman:

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it:  The ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot. 

[The Modernists] trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment.  Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world.  If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.  

The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century. 

These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.

Emphasis mine.  I would agree that it's not so much that modern literary fiction is difficult.  It's just boring.  One reason Grossman left out is the modern affiliation of literary writers with academic institutions which, in their own self-interest, value pretentious "literary" obfuscation.
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