Literary festival appears to have lost the plot

Some literary festivals gradually mutate into something else. This year the 16th Hay Festival seems less a wholesale celebration of literature than a salute to almost every intellectual and practical pastime known to human life – archaeology, biotechnology, cookery, horseracing, art and much else too. Children's literature, in recognition of its raised status, has a marquee – sponsored by Nestlé and Smarties. Most Nestlé signs have gone, as have the authors such as Germaine Greer and Jim Crace, who were outraged by its sponsorship.

Hay has had some big coups in its history. Mario Vargas Llosa, then an aspirant to the presidency of Peru, arrived in a helicopter. Last year Bill Clinton agonised over world poverty for an audience that had paid £100 per head, and Sir Paul McCartney read verse of a fairly indifferent quality, and refused to discuss it with an unappreciative press.

Yesterday, three bestselling British novelists – Nicholas Evans, Sebastian Faulks and Ian McEwan – bared their souls in marquees as hot as a steam bath. What do audiences come to hear? They want a novelist to unwrap a creative mystery and, at the same time, to tell us where it came from. It's never easy for a novelist, said Faulks, who was here to promote his book On Green Dolphin Strand.

"You spend two years in a darkened room talking to no one. Then you have to speak to 650 people. It's not natural ... And if you don't do it, you don't meet new readers. Encouragement from new readers can be a necessary confidence- building measure."

There was something bizarre about all three occasions. Each author was paying homage to America. Evans, who lives in Devon, has set his three books in Montana. "I think it was something to do with my childhood obsession with American cowboy films," he said. "I couldn't face the thought of writing about bedsits in Camden."

Faulks' novel is set in 1960s America "It's a sort of love letter to America," he said. McEwan, who was delivering a lecture about the American critic Edmund Wilson, talked of Wilson's lucidity and clarity, something missing from the theory-besotted world of contemporary criticism. Faulks said: "Britain has become so much more interesting for a novelist in the past 20 years. It's a post-political, post-moral world. No one is allowed to pass judgement."

It is legitimate to pass judgement on the style of an interview though. Two of these interviews were conducted by Charlie Lee Potter of Radio 4's Open Book. Authors should, if necessary, be harried. Lee Potter's was more the soft soap approach.

She told Evans how beautiful her studio manager had found him. Faulks was described as being equally eloquent as speaker and writer. They sat and purred.