Govorov on Teju Cole, Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Franzen

It's also true that the gentlemen of mediocre talent have usually written themselves out in the most pitiful fashion by the time they reach venerable old age, though often they themselves don't realize it. It frequently turns out that a writer who's said to have very profound ideas, and who's expected to exert a very serious influence on the development of society, in the end reveals such triviality and insipidity in his fundamental themes that no one regrets the fact that he managed to write himself out so soon. 

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 89