I don't see how this could come across as sneering at Pynchon and Wallace; I don't know enough about Gravity's Rainbow to even know what it's about, much less to dismiss it. And Wallace wrote one of the most brilliant essays I've ever read, so I couldn't possible be sneering at any of his work. What I will do, though — gleefully — is sneer at anyone who name drops them in a shallow attempt to appear superior. While referencing them isn't always name-dropping, in Stein's case it clearly is.

And the quality of Wallace's writing doesn't change the fact that he's been the Flavor of the Moment off and on at various points, especially whenever it's convenient for someone to bemoan the state of adult literacy in the US. My opinion of Wallace is roughly equivalent to Gandhi's often-quoted opinion of Jesus. (And I name-dropped Michael Chabon twice, and he was no less the Flavor of the Moment for a while there).

The fact remains that I'm going to get a lot more out of a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel than I'm likely to get out of a Jonathan Franzen novel. And I'll insist that Pratchett speaks no less to the human condition than any NYT book critic-approved "serious" author, the key difference being that he does it in a way that speaks to me.

You seem to be reacting to my claim that "grown-up" literature needs to be as plot-driven as pulp if they expect people to read it. But I'm not making that claim. If anything, I'm saying the opposite: people should be reading anything they can get their hands on, regardless of how it's labeled or categorized.

And more important than that: I wish that people would more often make note of what pulp does well instead of just saying "they're doing different things" and leaving it at that. People talk as if accessibility invariably equates to shallowness. But at the same time, a more "serious" work of literature can be praised as an experiment in form or style and still be considered valuable. So why do so many people, including those of us who have no problem with reading "pulp," still dismiss it as the intellectual equivalent of junk food? Why not acknowledge what it does well, on its own merits, regardless of anything else?

More specifically: The Hunger Games has sold so astoundingly well because it's so well paced. It's difficult not to read it within a day or two. Instead of being an ass like Stein, and equating it to Horton Hears a Who, why not acknowledge its pacing and accessibility as a quality? If I were working on my great American novel about the life experiences of a pudgy guy in video game development, I could either look at the ridiculous sales of Hunger Games and say "sure, dumb it down and people will read it," or I could say, "how did Collins achieve something so eminently readable, and how can I apply her technique to my own writing?" It's almost impossible that I'd ever achieve the same level of success, but it'd be less arrogant than just assuming that every step towards accessibility is a sacrifice of something meaningful.

And as a side note to that: I don't think you can conclude much of anything from the sales figures of pulp novels other than the obvious, which is that accessible novels are accessible. I'm not saying that the so-called Twilight Moms don't exist at all; I'm saying that they're not the overwhelming cultural phenomenon that pretentious types make them out to be. If anything, the fact that they're so accessible makes it even less likely that that's all people are reading — if it's less of an investment, then it leaves more time to read other stuff. For the ones that do exist, sure, I'd encourage them to join book clubs and get recommendations of other works that would interest them. It'd just be a mistake to assume that they get nothing more than entertainment from reading "pulp," or that they would of course be more enlightened after reading something more "literary." Books speak to people in different ways for different reasons.