The pursuit of quippiness: A problem endemic in much new fiction

Sam Lipsyte's story, The Naturals, in the current New Yorker, while obviously very well written and even very amusing doesn't amount to much in the end in my view and here's why: he's very adept at creating quirky characters (an Internet professional wrestler) with odd obsessions and behavior (won't let anyone approach her refrigerator) who speak in quippy dialogue, and it's all funny as you're reading it and when you've finished, if you look back at all, you have to say: There's not a single real or even slightly credible character in this story. Nobody speaks like that - except maybe a writer, who doesn't actually speak like that, either, but who crafts speech like that so that his character trade both witticisms and malaprops (koisk for kiosk, omelet for Hamlet) but they all sound the same - like him. So in a story like this one you could pretty much trade one character's "lines" for any of the others, it wouldn't matter that much, as they all sound the same - and it's very hard for us to navigate among them (I have to constantly be looking at the proper nouns: Who's Larry? Who's Stell?). Dialogue in my view should define character and not dance off following a musical line of its own. I don't mean to be hard on this one particular story, but it's a very high-quality representative of an endemic problem in a lot of new fiction - the influence of "the golden age of television" (a term in this story, and also in another recent NYer story btw) including quip-com. Not always a good influence; it's not all about surface wit or even surface beauty, but about depth of feeling and ideas, about people and their lives: read any single Alice Munro or William Trevor story against this one and you'll see what I mean.