More to the point is the ever-growing herd of indistinguishable
young writers who seem to have been produced by these same word
factories [MFA creative writing programs]. Almost invariably they
display the hallmarks of committee effort: emotional restraint
and lack of linguistic idiosyncrasy; no vision, just voice; no
fictional world of substance and variety, just a smooth surface
of diaristic, autobiographical and confessional speech.... The
result is a late-20th-Century school of fiction, a school in which
flat passes for oblique, vacuity for resonance, and in which the
trivial is defended by the socialist-realist rationalization that
it's supposed to be that way because that's the way we really are!...
No wonder that, in an age when writers from Buenos Aires to Prague
to Tel Aviv are feverishly whipping up wild fictional concoctions,
we Americans approach the smorgasbord of literature bearing only
the conformist dogma of the workshop.
-- "Chris Altacruise" Los Angeles Times Book
Review, 3/24/91