WE MAY NEVER know how Homer Simpson cast his ballot in the recent presidential election – assuming he bothered and managed to vote – but I for one fear the worst. Certainly many of real life's Homers went for George W. Bush, whose infelicities of language mark him as a true American male, honorary if not actual swiller of Duff, and perhaps even Fudd, beer. (A friend told me he had seen John Kerry describe himself as "giddy" at the Boston Red Sox' World Series triumph, and we wincingly agreed that no man can use language like that in public and hope to be elected president.)

It is central to The Simpsons' genius and its exceptionally long television run that Homer is the modern American everyman. He is fat, lazy, and ignorant, and this is funny because we all know someone very much like him. Homer might not quite be the match of George W. as a malapropist, but plainly he is on adversarial terms with the English language, and this too makes him funny. (A small, cruelly brilliant Simpsons moment from long ago: second-grader Lisa dismisses one of Homer's arguments about something as "specious," whereupon he replies, genuinely flattered, "Why, thank you, honey!") His best-known locution is the now-legendary "d'oh!" – not quite a word, really, but full of simian meaning and feeling all the same.

Although The Simpsons has long flashed with puns and other witticisms of the word, it is not at bottom a show about language. Much of the fun rises from visual gags (the hordes of rats fleeing Mr. Burns's nuclear plant ahead of a core meltdown, miraculously averted at the last second by Homer in an "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" moment of button-pushing) and cultural spoofs (Marge as Blanche DuBois in the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire, Aerosmith playing at Moe's Tavern). And because America's is not fundamentally a culture of language, there is a kind of moral poetry in the country's essence being so convincingly captured in a crudely sketched and brightly colored cartoon.

Writing about The Simpsons, then, would seem to be quite beside the point, yet Chris Turner, a young Canadian cultural critic, has done so anyway, and at book length. His Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation (Da Capo, $26) is clearly a labor of love and gave him considerable pleasure to write. It is, alas, and despite a foreword by aging Gen X-er Douglas Coupland, a bore to read, a numbing mishmash of vivisected jokes, pop-sociological musings, and awkward episode codes. One plows slowly through it with eyelids growing heavy and head nodding. But in its very drabness the book does remind us that language easily becomes superfluous, even suspect, in a culture that doesn't have much use for words except in business transactions, prayers, and political slogans and discourages verbal activity in excess of these austere purposes.

What does it mean to be a writer, a sculptor of language, in a culture that disdains word sculpture? Perhaps it is like being a Democrat in a red state and having to choose from a menu of distressing choices: accommodate, defy, ignore, change the subject, flee, or surrender. Some writers go for the see-Jane-run style, the Lego-block sentences without commas or other socialist punctuation. Many others retreat to universities, where they find safety of a sort in numbers of their own kind, desert animals huddled about muddy water holes while all around them the sirocco blows. Most (I daresay) take to drink or some other form of self-medication, since the problem in the end is insuperable. For all the happy talk about rising book sales, book clubs, readings, and the rest of it, the truth is that we live in a post-literary, post-literate society whose highest form of expression is the TV commercial. I wonder if that is a paradox – can you have a society, let alone a self-governing one, with KFC but without a living literature? – and I suspect I am not the only writer to wonder, or worry.

Sometime in the early 1990s I told a literate friend, born in Europe, that if he wished to understand the United States, he must watch The Simpsons. He laughed in that polite way Europeans laugh when they mean to suggest to you that you are out of your mind. Truth in a television cartoon? I think he never watched, but then maybe he didn't need to, protected as he was by university life and his tenured place in it. And I didn't insist, for I did not see how late the American hour had grown and how near to nightfall we had come. Also, I was drunk. Besides, when Conan O'Brien stopped producing The Simpsons in 1993, the show seemed markedly less funny to me, and I lost interest.

Universities are the monasteries of our time, so I suppose I shouldn't be quite so exasperated with them. On their campuses, spread with cemetery lawns, the written word is embalmed, but at least the embalming is done with respect – with the sense that the written word is valuable – and at least embalming is an act of preservation if not understanding. Let us not forget that some day the malaprop presidency of George W. will come to an end, The Simpsons will still be on, and we will all celebrate. One word: Duff!