Pennac brings a fresh point of view on morality, hapiness, character motivations, etc. Flaubert characters are monodimensional while pretending they are complex.
And nothomb has a different take on madness, absurd and finding life in it. Flaubert states what now we know is obvious, because we have read it ten times.
Flaubert tries to sell you something in the disguise of a story. I find it unsatisfying now that we have all those new flavors and textures in abundance.
We are drowning in talent and creativity, beauty and emotion. Our generation is blessed with so much good fresh cake I don't see the point of the dry one.
But to be honest, the only argument I need is that if you take a 100 kids and make them read all of them, 98 will not finish Flaubert if they have a choice, but they might finish one if the other books. That's not because Flaubert is too hard to get into.
I used to be relativistic in arts just like your comment, then I read Dumas (Monte Cristo) and Hugo (1793, The Workers of the Sea) and my jaw dropped. Must read ! (French here too)
That said, I'd love if music video clips, video games, TV shows took more inspiration from literature and merge more the different mediums
Agreed about inertia and conservatism, but still in France I notice we read lots of recent books too.