If you the writer succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making your work structurally and technically cutting-edge, making the appropriate intertextual references. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way—essentially television on the page—that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other, and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable. 

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there’s so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how ficiton is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. It’s unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it’s neat. There’s so much mass commercial entertainment that’s so good and so slick, this is something that I don’t think any other generation has confronted. That’s what it’s like to be a writer now. I think it’s the best time to be alive ever, and it’s probably the best time to be a writer. I’m not sure it’s the easiest time.