But every writer enters a kind of decaying orbit at some point. There’s always a point where the writer cannot withstand the inertia of complacency. It varies for every writer, but it happens to almost everyone.

It’s just the way it is. And some writers, like Jonathan Carroll for awhile there, feel like they haven’t quite gotten it right, and so the repeating is an attempt to render in more perfect form what they feel was imperfectly rendered the first or second or even third time.

Jeff VanderMeer

I don’t know that anyone expects Judith Krantz or Danielle Steele to improve much over their professional lifetime. I don’t remember hearing anyone note that any particular Nero Wolfe was an improvement (or not) over a predecessor.

My impression of literary fiction includes more of an expectation of artistic growth and development. Milan Kundera gets knocked for rewriting the same story over and over again. The latest Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Eco, Updike or Barth will be scrutinized to see if it is better than the last, to see if the master has at least retained his or her ability to understand the human condition and render it to the reader.

Part of that might be the emphasis on novelty in the artsy crowd. Personally, I think the search for the shock value of "new" can easily become distracting and misleading.

Perhaps this is selective attention on my part, the result of wishful thinking. What is clear to me is the dissapointment I experience when I read some novel excerpt by a great master in "Asimov’s" and the quality is not only not their best but barely up to the standards of a first appearance in a second tier magazine.

I don’t think anyone is doing anyone else a favor by cutting the greats so much slack.

Best regards,
Alan Lattimore

JeffV

After reading her reply above, I imagine Nalo Hopkinson would second this nomination: Gene Wolfe.