Which (contemporary) novelists do you think are really overrated / overhyped? For me, in ascending order, it would be:
1) Ian McEwan
2) Zadie Smith
3) Jonathan Safran Foer
With all three, I don't understand why they are hailed as geniuses (though in Smith's case it's something to do with being beautiful and ethnic and a Cambridge graduate), but McEwan is the absolute worst. He may have been quite edgy and dark when he started, but now he's churning out the most pompous, bourgeois, tedious twaddle I've ever read. A typical sentence of his would be something like: 'Hermione told Sebastian that Victor was falling in love with Cecily; then she went to use the bath salts her goddaughter had bought her as an engagement present before things had gone wrong with Quentin'.
Anyone else?