Readers of popular fiction judge an author by his or her ability to make the common language uncommonly meaningful, and to make an oftentold tale freshly exciting. The amount of effort a reader puts into this fiction is minimal. Critics are human. They don't like being irrelevant. Marx, Freud, and Sartre are the Muses of modernism.
Life is seen as fundamentally absurd.
No matter how an individual strives, nothing significant will change. Or, in more accessible language, you can't win for losing. The Muses of popular fiction are Zoroaster and Jung, the philosphy more classical than to modern. In a word, popular fiction is heroic and transcendent at a time when heroism and transcendence are out of intellectual favor. Publishers, whose job is to make money by predicting the size of the market for a piece of fiction, are constantly trying guess where a manuscript falls on the scale of white to gray to black.