No, I am not bitter. Well, maybe a little. But then, so are all the best writers

Seen Billy Elliot yet? Had your weekly fix of feel-good factor? I have. All but drowned in the stuff. So much feel-good factor that I came away feeling worse than I'd felt in years.

Seen Billy Elliot yet? Had your weekly fix of feel-good factor? I have. All but drowned in the stuff. So much feel-good factor that I came away feeling worse than I'd felt in years.

It's not that I'm averse to feeling good. I just want to feel good for some reason. And a boy who makes the men in his family weep with pride because he can do River Dance isn't a good reason, not when the film's supposed to be about the men in his family's hostility to ballet. Let's get our dances sorted here.

We make too much of a palaver out of being moved. There are spots on a piano where all you have to do is bang a couple of keys and your heart breaks. Doyng! - and you're on your knees.

Language is the same. Heartbreak lies on the surface of language like poison dust on the rooftops of Chernobyl. I love you, I don't love you, I do love you after all, too late, goodbye for ever, remember me - and you're a blubbering wreck. With film it's even easier because with film there are three surfaces to scrape. I love you, here's a picture of me loving you, doyng! Moved? Of course you're moved. Observe a 10-ton truck bearing down on you and you're profoundly moved.

But then, I would say that, wouldn't I? I am an acrid bastard. I know that, because someone has recently sent me a postcard to tell me so. No signature. Just another anonymous well-wisher. "Why are you so bitter?" the card says. "Stop writing." End of message.

I have the card on my desk in front of me. It transfixes me in the way that bad reviews do. All writers know this: good reviews fade like the perfumes of forgotten lovers; bad ones stick around like the stench of a colony of dead rats under your floorboards. Masochism explains it. We're in it for the pain. So into the bin go the invitations to telephone sex from the entire Australian beach-volleyball team, into the rubbish the messages of encouragement from the Pope, from Putin, from Harold Pinter, and out on your desk, leaning against your lamp where you can see it the minute you start work, sits the card saying, "Why are you so bitter? Stop writing."

It's the non sequitur that fascinates me. Shouldn't it read, "Why are you so bitter? Seek help"? Or, more logical still, given that it's a commonplace of our times that writing is a therapeutic help, "Why are you so bitter? Keep writing"?

But that, too, begs a question. In order to cure exactly which malady would writing be the therapy? Bitterness? We don't welcome bitterness, suddenly, we who as lovers of literature have always rejoiced in the poisoned periods of Alexander Pope, the spleen of Baudelaire, the spectacle of Byron rounding on his enemies in bile-filled couplets, the curdled riffs of Céline, Jane Austen tossing a character for whom she has little sympathy (though of course the men like her) off the Cobb at Lyme Regis? Yes, yes, I know that there are those who think it is a charge against a writer that he doesn't like women, or children, or animal-rights protesters, or Jews, or Christians, but the truth is, there is no readerly joy to equal following an inexhaustibly malign writer through every spiral of his (yes, yes, or her) misanthropy.

"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive," wrote Philip Roth in that masterpiece of mordancy, Sabbath's Theater, "you can't beat the nasty side of existence." And for pure intellectual exhilaration, you can't beat a nasty work of literature.

Thrilling to see Malcolm Bradbury coming out in this newspaper the other day in favour of the good old poetic virtues of reclusiveness, marginality, dourness and intransigence. The occasion was the death of the implacable R S Thomas, though I like to think Bradbury was talking just as feelingly about himself, smarting unattended in the Fens all these years. A stirring piece, whatever its motives, reminding us that a certain sort of seriousness is vanishing before our eyes, in favour of those postmodern imps playfulness, triviality, lightness of touch and - my interpolation - the feel-good factor.

"Thomas himself was never an easy poet nor always a just or generous man," Bradbury writes approvingly. Wonderful! I told you the piece was thrilling. Who wants easy from a writer? Who wants just or generous? Cruel's the ticket. Sour, savage, maddened.

Unless, that is, you hanker for that bland entity, that critical nothingness, that curse of the all-pleasing bookjacket, the "good read". Myself, I abominate this misusage of the word "read". So moderate, it sounds. So innocuously consensual. Shostakovich? A good listen. Michelangelo? A good look. Slobodan Milosevic? A good suffer. If we really must have reads, let them at least be bad ones. "A vitriolic read" - I'd just about buy that. "So acerbic, you'll barely be able to breathe while you're reading it and will want to shoot yourself when you've finished," would please me even more.

Meanwhile, the country's richest living writer, as rich almost as a Spice Girl, is giving money to a good cause. The single-parent family. Very nice. And it tells us all we need to know about ourselves that the richest living writer got that way writing children's stories. Except for where the old dour poets gather at the margins, cursing, that's what our culture aspires to now - the children's story.

Mark my words, it can only end in tears.