Next Year, ‘The Brothers Baldwin’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn : Culture: A solution to its decline and fall in America.

Novelist Carole Maso proclaimed at a March conference sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle that “there is no room in commercial publishing for the ambitious goals of the serious writer. It is now an entertainment industry.”

She was prophetic: Later that month, at the Academy Awards, Kirk Douglas was introduced as a “bestselling novelist.”

I haven’t read Douglas’ novel, so perhaps it’s right up there with “Moby Dick.” But regardless of its quality, the fact that actors now seem to be writing novels as well as optioning them suggests a solution to the decline in U.S. literary culture.

Isn’t it obvious? Celebrities, from Douglas to Ivana Trump, Kathie Lee Gifford to Patti Davis, want to be known as people with brains and hearts as well as pretty faces. Serious writers, from Nobel recipients Patrick White and Joseph Brodsky to Pulitzer winners Peter Taylor and Alison Lurie, want readers, yet have trouble selling more than few thousand copies of their work. It’s a classic case of pent-up demand waiting to meet oversupply. All that’s needed is a clearinghouse teaming the Brodskys with the Trumps: one writes, the other lends the name.

Sure, Carrie Fisher writes well, and Umberto Eco actually sells well, but they’re exceptions. For most celebrities and writers, the leasing of famous names makes perfect sense, freeing writers from worrying about sales and celebrities from having to waste time at the keyboard.

There are kinks in this idea, but nothing that can’t be worked out. If Burt Reynolds is going to tell Jay and Arsenio how he came to write a sequel to “A Frolic of His Own,” William Gaddis will have to offer him some coaching--and stress that when he used the term frolic, he had an un-Hollywood definition in mind.