This from Douglas Coupland, blogging at The Times:

"I find a stifling homogeneity in most fiction. I walk into a bookstore and look at the shelves filled with thousands of doubtless worthy novels — beautifully crafted, nicely honed and all of that — novels of love, loss and redemption and … in my head I feel as if I’ve walked into a Broyhill furniture showroom. I feel like I’m looking at countless dark-stained colonial-style bedroom suites, and endless arrays of pickled-maple empire dining sets, with no spindle left unturned, every buffed surface dreaming of a shot of Pledge."

He's not wrong (even if his own books have helped contribute, perhaps in spite of themselves?? to the whimsy-at-all-costs/ kind-of-brainy-and-cutesy strain of non-realist work -- which has achieved its own variety of sameness). For most bookstores. Thank God there are still places like St. Mark's Books.