The war for the soul of literature

Two critics, one revered and the other almost universally reviled, protest that the literary world has been taken over by big, bad, "ambitious" novels.

By Laura Miller

Jul 15, 2004 | Once upon a time -- about 15 or 20 years ago, to be precise -- when people complained about contemporary fiction, they complained about minimalism. The quintessential minimalist work was a short story written in austere, emotionally muted prose. It described a scene of domestic despair or disconnection fully understood by its protagonist only in a closing moment of bleak epiphany. It was written by Raymond Carver or Ann Beattie or an acolyte thereof, and edited by Gordon Lish. It was published in the New Yorker.

Whole books were dedicated to denouncing this trend and the master's of fine arts writing programs that were accused of popping out graduates who in turn popped out minimalist stories like a chain of identical and tasteless breakfast sausages. The days of minimalism's preeminence, if it ever truly had that, are gone, but the habit of raising a hue and cry about the state of contemporary fiction has proven addictive. We read different kinds of novels now, and so we have a different sort of critic to denounce them.

James Wood is the most admired literary critic at work today, and Dale Peck is the most reviled. Yet they share the same loathing, for a type of fiction that Wood calls "hysterical realism" and that Peck labels "recherché postmodernism." Most people who follow contemporary fiction can confidently name some books that fall into this category and can tell you what they're like: They're big, they're full of information, ideas and stylistic riffs; they have eventful plots that transpire on what's often called a "broad social canvas"; they experiment with form and voice; they're overtly (or maybe just overly) smart. Or at least that's what they're supposed to be like.

Maximalism, to use this genre's most reactionary name, turns out to be a lot less uniform than minimalism. If minimalism's paterfamilias is indisputably Raymond Carver, maximalism's is Don DeLillo -- unless it's Thomas Pynchon. (DeLillo is the star that some younger maximalists claim to steer by, but the less solemn Pynchon seems the better fit.) The novelists usually rounded up in this group include Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen (who wrote a famous 1996 essay on the "social novel" for Harper's Magazine), Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith and, especially, David Foster Wallace. But the books these writers produce don't always have much in common. Some of them (Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," for one) aren't even especially long -- which seems like the minimum you'd expect from a maximalist novel.

In a way, these are indeed "social" novels, not because of their content or style but because what connects them is their audience. The same people tend to like them all; it is a society of shared taste, a genre consolidated less by the books themselves than by their fans' sense of what kind of novel they want. A lot of these fans are critics, and this is in part because novels of ideas make critics feel clever and useful -- there's so much to explain! -- and, as Wood is fond of pointing out, they have essayistic passages, such as Wallace's self-contained digression on videophones in "Infinite Jest." Since critics are themselves essayists, such interludes strike them as both accessible and collegial.

Next Page: Wood and Peck's enemies are not so much the perpetrators of maximalist novels as those who publish and praise them

• View blog reactions