The Vacuum of Good Contemporary Literature Sucks

Granted, several interesting and well wrought novels have been written in the past few decades, but I swear, if I read one more paragraph like this one from Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I am going to give up on the whole time period:

Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted. But in fact, the earth was nothing but a chunk of rock floating in one little corner of the universe: a temporary foothold in the vast emptiness of space. It---and all of us with it---could be blown away tomorrow by a momentary flash of something or a tiny shift in the universe's energy. Beneath this breathtaking skyful of stars, the uncertainty of my own existence struck me with full force (though not in so many words, of course). It was a stunning discovery for a young boy.

We get it: universe big, man small; overwhelming force of nature, alienation of the individual. Geez, come up with a different insight already. Oh, but wait, there's still the redemption-through intimacy-with-nature insight and the embrace-of-subjectivity-when-faced-with-an-unfathomable-universe insight, which Murakami articulates in the next paragraph:

Looking up at the dawn stars from the bottom of a well was a special experience very different from looking at the full, starry sky on the mountaintop, as if my mind---my self---my very existence---were firmly bonded through my narrow window to each one of those stars in the sky. I felt a deep sense of intimacy towards them: they were my stars, visible to no one but me, down here in the dark well. I embraced them as my own, and they in turn showered me with a kind of energy and warmth.

These, along with the alienation-through-modernity and redemption-through-community insights constitute the range of ideas that are observable in contemporary fiction. It's all about alienation and redemption---one book after the next---and they don't even have the compensation of strong character development! Contemporary authors usually select a handful of personality quirks or distinguishing physical traits for each character and then commit what amounts to synecdochic abuse by making these stand in for the character's entire selfhood. The repetiveness, the loose foundations of description, the vagueness---my god, the vagueness--- they're maddening, the more so because they can drive me to curmudgeonly rants like this one. I hate to say it, but maybe the novel just isn't suited to the fiction of the present day. With the relative decline of the novel has come the rise of the short story format, and novels today are frequently written as a series of vignettes, resembling collections of short stories. Perhaps it's time to pass the torch or to create a new medium that better reconciles the two genres. The situation can't continue as it is. At least, I hope it can't.