The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone-cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Shook. And it may be; Shook definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a gray void of aesthetic relativism.