Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Turow

Turow’s jab lands because it’s less a theory of art than a complaint about a broken social contract. “Cost” frames postmodernism like a fiscal disaster: somebody spent cultural capital on cleverness, and the bill came due in empty seats. Coming from a bestselling novelist who made his name in the mass-market courtroom thriller, the line reads as a defense of legibility and narrative momentum, not just nostalgia. He’s arguing that literature didn’t merely change; it abdicated a public role.

The subtext is an anxiety about gatekeeping. Postmodern fiction’s trademarks - irony as default posture, self-referential games, skepticism toward plot and character as “bourgeois” comforts - often function as signals of belonging. If you get the joke, you’re in. If you don’t, you’re asked to feel uneducated rather than simply unmoved. Turow is naming the moment when difficulty stopped being an invitation to reread and started feeling like a test you didn’t agree to take.

Context matters: postwar academia’s rise, the canon wars, creative writing programs, and a literary economy increasingly split between prestige and popularity. Postmodernism didn’t singlehandedly drive readers to television, the internet, or genre fiction, but it helped legitimate a style of “serious” writing that could thrive without them. Turow’s real target is the moral alibi that followed: if audiences leave, it’s because they’re philistines. His provocation insists the opposite: readers are a constituency, and ignoring them has consequences.