Sheila Heti is known as a writer who seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the three novels that brought her to prominence: How Should a Person Be? (2012), Motherhood (2018), and Pure Colour (2022). This strategy underpins the mode that has commonly come to be known  "autofiction," and of the writers associated with it, Heti is arguably the exemplary figure. Yet while the term itself is now pervasive in discussions of fiction that at one time might simply have been called "autobiographical," Heti's novels don't altogether seem autobiographical if we expect such fiction to not merely borrow various details from the author’s life but to provide a credible depiction of a character’s actions and circumstances that we could imagine also derives from the author's life–in other words, we expect an autobiographical fiction to be essentially realistic. Heti's novels don't really meet this expectation.

The first two certainly seem to meet the initial criterion, as the characters are preoccupied with issues that Heti has verified were also her own concerns. (In How Should a Person Be?, the character is even named "Sheila," although we still could (and should) question how absolute is the connection between author and character). In both novels, form is loosened up considerably in an apparent effort to accommodate the protagonists' ruminative way of thinking, and emphasize the drift of their experiences as they ponder the ramifications of the questions they are asking and the answers they seek. But in each novel there is a kind of willful naivete or a kind of deliberate ingenuousness shared by the protagonists that makes these characters more caricature than lifelike representation–not quite surreal, but exaggerated versions of a woman seeking to discover the key to becoming an authentic self or sort through the benefits and risks of motherhood. This seems deliberate, not a deficiency of craft.

If anything, Pure Colour departs even more obviously from the protocols of realism, veering into outright fantasy–at one point in the novel both the protagonist and her deceased father find themselves trapped inside the leaves of a tree! This novel may draw on the author's youthful experiences–in particular Heti's relationship with her own father–but they are thoroughly transformed into fiction, indeed a patently artificial kind of fiction. But if Pure Colour is more overt in its divergence from reality, all three of these novels strike me as pretty unmistakably fictions, however much the critical response to them emphasized the "auto" qualities, thus establishing them as among the integral works in the category of autofiction, a category that has grown to encompass practically any work of fiction that leaves the impression it originates in the author's life circumstances. At some point it becomes difficult to see how any work of ostensible fiction doesn't somehow derive from the writer's experiences in some way, but since no other trend or movement in current fiction has arisen to capture critics' fancy, "autofiction" has expanded sufficiently to become the defining literary mode of the early twenty-first century. 

Alphabetical Diaries (2024) would seem to take autofiction away from fiction altogether into pure personal confession. Literally a selection from Heti's diaries over a ten-year period, the book actually turns out to be less directly personal in its effect and more artificial in its form than the three previous novels. It seems to present more personal revelations than the novels, but these revelations ultimately seem instead attached to a fictional character the diaries have created rather than to Sheila Heti, the putative author of the book, whose method of constructing the book has rendered her youthful self in a discontinuous, fragmented way that decreases identification of that self with the autobiographical Heti and refocuses our attention on those patterns, repetitions, and mannerisms we more commonly track in our apprehension of invented characters. One suspects that Heti herself experiences a certain distance from this version of herself recorded in the diaries, and the randomly ordered method with which the diary entries have been assembled contributes to a kind of distance between reader and protagonist that most memoir writers likely would not seek to create.

Instead of presenting the diary in the normally expected chronological order (or perhaps some thematic adaptation of chronology or narrative), Heti has arranged them alphabetically according to the first letter of each sentence. This eliminates ordinary coherence, but the technique provides an alternative sort of coherence based, again, on repetition and the appearance of patterns that might not be as readily perceptible in a conventionally published journal. Some words are lengthily repeated–the sentences beginning with "I" and "We," for example, occur for multiple pages in a row–and certain names as well are not only repeated serially but reoccur frequently throughout the book. ("Lars" seems to reoccur the most.) At other times the juxtaposed entries are humorous in their unexpected resonances, either through some unintentional connection or in some cases what seems to be directly contradictory statements. ("The book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shriveled arm that can't raise itself to shake your hand, a withered arm and hand. The book is beautiful and practically perfect.") As a whole, the entries don't always seem to express a unified personality: partly this is the effect of mixing and matching utterances composed at different times (at a relatively formative stage of developing a personality), but such variety in sensibility surely also means to suggest that a human identify isn't so easily integrated.

Thus while the choice to reconfigure the diary according to a pre-set scheme initially does seem random, the experience of reading Alphabetical Diaries conveys the strong impression of deliberation and design. Where How Should a Person Be or Motherhood seem casually organized, without overarching structure, Alphabetical Diaries is all structure Form in those two novels threatens to undermine the feel of "life";  this book really only exists because of its form. Not only is it doubtful we would have that much interest in Heti's diaries if they were published "straight" (she has herself said in an interview that she would have never considered publishing them this way), aside from the salacious details provided about her sex life, the "content" of Alphabetical Diaries really has minimal interest. Witnessing a writer anguishing over her romantic relationships or worrying about the progress of her work neither contributes much to our understanding of the progress of love, nor are we given enough detail about what worries her about the work (what she is working on is always just referred to as "the book") for our appreciation of Heti's literary achievement to be enhanced. The significance of Alphabetical Diaries lies entirely in its status as an unorthodox (and arguably innovative) exercise in form.

Heti previously enlisted chance as a compositional method in Motherhood, in which the narrator/protagonist flips a coin in a form of divination to get answers about the pressing questions she is asking about herself and her life. But here the strategy doesn't provide the novel itself with its organizing principle but assists the protagonist in her process of self-examination, otherwise offered as a more or less conventional first-person account. It acts to reinforce the protagonist's uncertainties and ambivalence, contributing in this case to the unity of characterization–the protagonist is defined by her doubts and her prolonged inability to finally resolve the dilemma she believes she faces. The question-and-answer sessions with the coins (or whatever metaphysical presence it is that speaks through the coins) make concrete the novel's questioning of the expectations society places on women (and often enough women place on themselves, as the protagonist increasingly discovers) that is the ultimate unifying element in Motherhood, although this larger thematic exploration requires a plausibly consistent–in this case consistent in regarding her questions as important–protagonist character exploring her conflicted feelings.

It is surely not the accuracy of the answers she gets in response to the coin flips (which are only "yes" or "no"), but the salience of the questions she poses that help this protagonist (and us) to judge the wisdom of her ultimate decision. Nevertheless, one suspects that Heti wasn't entirely confined to actual coin flips in determining the answers, that she massaged the results somewhat for the occasional surprise or other dramatic effect. Likewise, it seems more than likely that some entries in Alphabetical Diaries were trimmed away or alphabetical order fudged a bit in arranging the contents of the diaries for extra continuity or for humor's sake. Both books involve artifice, even though Motherhood (as well as How Should a Person Be?) ostensibly tries to conceal it while Alphabetical Diaries announces it. Moreover, although Motherhood presents without equivocation as a novel, it pretty clearly mirrors Heti's own experience struggling with the question of motherhood, and for all practical purposes could pass for autobiography. Superficially, at least, Alphabetical Diaries presents as nonfiction, but in its aesthetic order ("aesthetic" partly be design and partly contingent) finally it fulfills the expectations we have of works of fiction as much as, or even more than those of memoir or autobiography, or, indeed, those now associated with autofiction.

In this way, I myself found Alphabetical Diaries more satisfying than any of her previous books, even if in general I don't much care for memoir and don't read writers' diaries. The book refurbishes the concept of "creative non-fiction," although it is almost certainly not what the creators of that label had in mind. I am tempted to say it is not nonfiction at all but in fact a novel, if we understand the distinction between a novel and a work of nonfiction to be less the presence of a made-up story vs. the recording of literal truth and more a question of the attention paid to form and prose style, not just as the means for addressing a subject but for making the reader aware of language as the writer's medium, the ultimate subject of any writing we want to call "literary." However, I recognize that there is nothing inherent to nonfiction that precludes this approach to literary language, so perhaps Alphabetical Diaries could be regarded as that "hybrid" of fiction and nonfiction that does manage to inhabit a space precisely in-between the two modes, justified in claiming admittance to both.

If this is the direction in which "autofiction" has taken Sheila Heti, toward a genuine contestation of the separate domains assigned to fiction and nonfiction, and Alphabetical Diaries stands as its current, albeit provisional, expression (more to come), then I think it is legitimate to consider her an "experimental" writer. "Autofiction," given the presently broad applications of the term, would seem to be at the limits of its utility as a critical tool in explicating a practice in contemporary fiction. It has become so conflated simply with "fiction that draws on the author's real-life experiences" that it is essentially meaningless–the concept has become so capacious that it potentially includes everything that isn't avowedly fantastic. The relative popularity of autofiction (to the extent  "literary fiction" can be popular) is no doubt attributable mainly to its exploitation by publishers as a publishing gimmick, as well as its compatibility with the congruent rise in popularity of creative nonfiction and social media. (These may not be mutually exclusive explanations.) Still, the idea of autofiction might have developed into a weightier endeavor if it had explicitly sought to undermine long-established beliefs about the connections between "life" and literary "art": Isn't fiction always already a reflection of "life?" To what extent is life governed by fictions in the first place? How much does form itself always distort life? Such questions are perhaps implicit in the early works to be designated "autofiction," but most critical discourse about it, at least, has stopped asking them.

Alphabetical Diaries makes me think that Sheila Heti had them in mind when she wrote How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood  and wants to renew them with this latest book. Her interest in employing nonconventional literary devices is clear enough in all of her books, and if she no longer has much interest in producing "autofiction" (if she ever had any), it would be surprising if her subsequent work reverted to workshop narrative strategies or a regressive realism. In a literary culture that has otherwise lost interest in experimental fiction, that would be worth something.

In her review of Lauren Oyler's No Judgment, Becca Rothfeld takes Oyler to task for including too little judgment, asserting that "her book's title is more accurate than she thinks." Although Oyler intends in her essays to defend judgment in criticism, few of them contain much of it, defined as specific analysis of the artistic works she discusses. Instead she merely displays attitude (an "edgy personality") to convey the superiority of the underlying judgments she leaves undeveloped. "Judgment," Rothfeld more than implies, is a requisite feature of criticism, and her review emphasizes the surprising lack of it in a book written by a critic who is otherwise well-known for her strong judgments (often negative) in many of the reviews she has written.

We can of course distinguish between "judgment" as assessment of quality and as cogency of insight or interpretation. Rothfeld seems to be faulting Oyler for including too little of the latter, but No Judgement is conspicuously a collection of essays (all of them written for inclusion in this book), not a selection of Oyler's reviews, in which the judgments are indeed usually expressed through relatively close attention to the work's manifest features, although among her critical writings are a number of essays less interested in appraisal of particular works than in examining a broader practice the critic has identified or a cultural phenomenon that is really the subject of the essay. The essays in No Judgement don't seem radically different from these other essays not categorizable simply as reviews, except that they are, for the most part, more directly personal, focused on Oyler's own life and circumstances. 

The essays included in Rothfeld's own recent collection of essays, All Things are Too Small, are, in fact, just as personal and discursive, although in her role as a regular staff reviewer for a major American newspaper, Rothfeld in most of her reviews both readily passes judgments  (as her review of Oyler's book itself shows) and endeavors to support them through evidence of careful reading. Finally both Rothfeld and Oyler understand criticism as the rendering of judgment, although of the two Rothfeld seems more committed to its execution in a rigorous version than Oyler. And indeed this orientation to criticism is shared by almost all general-interest reviewers (of all forms, both popular and "high" art), prompting the most widespread impression of the "critic" among most consumers of reviews as a kind of referee–a figure who pays close attention to the art activity in question to note if it has been carried out according to the rules and to signal us if there is a violation.

This is the most benign view of the critic, as an intrusive if necessary personage who is granted a certain degree of authority on artistic matters by possessing the right credentials or through force of personality and track record (which doesn't mean we can't argue vociferously if we believe the call is wrong). Some spectators, however, regard the critic with more disdain, as a purely unwelcome presence who rudely interposes him/herself between us and the objects of our admiration when the critic pronounces a negative judgment. In their willingness to express negative judgments, both Oyler and Rothfeld might certainly be vulnerable to this hostility toward the efforts of critics, but in the present critical culture both of them are rather unusual in their propensity for such judgments. Oyler in particular, as a novelist as well as a critic, should be credited for ignoring the implicit restriction on negative reviews that is generally observed by current reviewers of fiction. The blandly affirmative reviews that dominate most review spaces only reinforce the marginalization of critics by not merely trivializing the act of judgment but precluding the need for it altogether. 

In both No Judgment and All Things are Too Small, negative and positive judgments are expressed as part of larger arguments or surveys of broader phenomena, not as the goal of any individual piece–these are not collections of reviews, and few of the essays contain much extended specific analysis of a particular work or aesthetic object. (Rothfeld's "Our Entertainment was Arguing," mostly about Norman Rush's novel, Mating, with some additional discussion of His Girl Friday, is an exception.) Rothfeld's book makes an impassioned, if somewhat discontinuous argument on behalf of maximalism, in both art and life. In doing so, she criticizes minimalism in fiction, art and design, as well as the retreat from bodily pleasures represented by appeals to "mindfulness" and a resurgence of what seems like puritanism is sexual attitudes and practices. Oyler's concerns are a little more amorphous, but much of the book is taken up with critique of social media,both good and bad, including lengthy examinations of the machinations that go on at Goodreads, as well as a spirited defense of autofiction (in which category Oyler's own novel, Fake Accounts, is often counted).

Each of these authors explicate the works they do discuss amply enough for their purposes, but in both cases the essays are developed primarily through personal experience and a kind of cultural observation that bespeaks intimate familiarity with the products of popular culture (Oyler in particular through participation in social media, while Rothfeld seems less "online," more attuned to books and movies). Neither book shies away from personal revelation. Oyler wants us to know why she moved to Berlin, why she likes gossip, and where her sometimes debilitating anxiety comes from. Rothfeld freely discusses her own sexual desires and her impatience with expectations of feminine restraint, although her use of her own circumstances and experiences is more more integral as reinforcement of her book's rhetorical intentions, actually making it less purely confessional than in No Judgments, despite, for example, the provocative description of her lustful feelings about her future husband she provides in one of the essays.

But it would not really be accurate to call either No Judgment or All Things are Too Small examples of personal writing above all. Both books belong to what is now called cultural criticism, by self-identification and by a fair accounting of the subjects they address. This classification seems to fit because of the wide range of cultural objects covered (most of the essays could not properly be called "literary criticism" since works of literature are only occasionally their focus) and because ultimately each of these critics is most concerned with understanding the cultural significance of the subjects they examine, not their value as aesthetic expressions. This at first seems paradoxical given both writers' penchant for making and valorizing judgments, but the essays included in Rothfeld's book are pretty consistent with her approach elsewhere, and even Oyler's most infamous negative reviews often wander away from pure aesthetic analysis, while in other essays she is as likely to consider trends and tendencies as closely assess individual works. 

It seems to me that a preference for cultural criticism, in which books, both fiction and nonfiction, are enlisted in a superseding critique of culture, is shared by many of the most prominent American book reviewers, and not a small number of readers as well, especially readers not looking to reviews simply for recommendations or straightforward value judgments. Although such critics might explicitly identify themselves as cultural critics, as both Oyler and Rothfeld do in these two books, they are just as likely to be considered as "literary" critics taking a broader approach to analysis and interpretation than is allotted to aesthetic evaluation alone. Perhaps insisting on a distinction between these terms might be perceived as overly punctilious, a purist's attempt to maintain clear lines of demarcation between text-based literary analysis and an approach that sues the literary work as a means of tracking cultural tendencies, but I do believe these are different activities requiring a different orientation to both literature and to methods of criticism. Being clear about the substance of these differences can help in appreciating the relevance of a piece of criticism to the sort of interest one has in literary works as opposed to cultural observation, but also tells us something about the status of the literary in American culture–or at least about how that term is understood, especially among those who might be expected to uphold its ostensible value.

American culture has never exactly been regarded as especially literary. The U.S. has produced its share of important writers, but any survey of American literary history that accurately measures such writers against their prominence in culture at large would have to note that many of them were, for lengthy sketches of their careers (in some cases all of their careers), mostly unknown to their contemporaneous publics, either under-recognized or completely ignored (Melville, Dickinson, early Faulkner).The work of many of these writers challenged existing practices in both poetry and fiction, and it is questionable that it would have ever gained more attention if later critics had not made efforts to reckon with it and begin bringing it to wider readership. Many of their efforts were carried out through the auspices of the burgeoning field of academic literary study, which certainly included critics preoccupied with historical and cultural inquiry, but which eventually was dominated by those who were devoted to the explication, interpretation, and analysis of literary works as literature, seen as a subject valuable for its own sake. 

The establishment of literary study in the university also effectively created an American literary culture (and did much to endow the very term "literature" with its overtones of elevated significance), even if it was to some extent confined to those associated with or influenced by the university. The consolidation of academic authority to shape our conceptions of literature and the literary was only enhanced by the introduction of creative writing programs. Now not only was the study of "literature" and the practice of literary criticism confined almost exclusively to the academy–or at least most prominent critics came to have some connection with it–but the university would become the primary site for the production of literature as well, eventually all but excluding anyone but their graduates not only from being taken seriously as writers, but even from being published at all. In this context, "literary culture" became simply an outgrowth of the campus, an extension of academic life.

Creative writing still exercises its dominion over the direction of current poetry and literary fiction, but academic criticism has long ceased to concern itself with delineating the literary qualities of literature or accumulating knowledge about literature that isn't also or primarily knowledge about other subjects or about the nature of academic inquiry itself. At one time ti was not unusual to see some academically-employed critics doubling as general-interest critics as well, writing reviews of new books that signaled their active engagement with literature but avoided heavy-handed academic discourse. Very few such critics exist today. While it is true that some current popular reviewers have university experience, most of them abandoned academic literary study (voluntarily or involuntarily, due to the collapse of the job marked in literary study) in exchange for the chance to write about the intellectual and literary developments of the present. Becca Rothfeld is reflective of this reality: although she continues to be a candidate for a Ph.D (in philosophy), she has clearly enough opted to pursue a career in writing and editing, and her prose in All Things are Too Small shows little preoccupation with current academic discourse and its jargon.

Academic critics have virtually no influence on the reception of new work by American writers, and few readers would turn to them as the putative experts on the current state of American fiction. Yet at the same time, even though new fiction continues to be widely reviewed (as widely as the declining number of outlets for reviews allows), the kind of reviews that are available don't often rise above the formula of synopsis-summative judgment, unless  it is to incorporate memoir-ish anecdotes and excursions into cultural generalization. (Not unlike what we find in No Judgment and All Things are Too Small, although both Oyler and Rothfeld do it better than most.)

The majority of such reviews are written not by critics per se, but by other writers of fiction and poetry, who in the current critical culture have been deemed especially qualified to pass judgment on a practice they share and on which they are presumed to be experts. The consequence has been not a critical culture of deeply applied knowledge or candid assessment (although some writers indeed have and do these), but mostly of bland conformity with the predominant judgments rendered in most reviews–a kind of reflexive praise, either expressed in empty superlatives or a more reticent approval that seems calculated to preclude ruffling many feathers. Reviewers do not seem interested in contributing to a critical practice based on defensible standards and that encourages lively debate, but seem most concerned to maintain a critical establishment dedicated most of all to avoid giving offense.

In their reviewing, both Oyler and Rothfeld provide admirable exceptions to this unproductive state of affairs. On the other hand, in the two essay collections, they mostly choose not to include or expand on such reviews, or to offer essays that extend the sort of analysis used in the reviews to engage in further consideration of current literary practices, or the practice of criticism itself. Instead we have the exercises into autobiographical and cultural criticism comprising these books, which, however interesting in their own right they may be, reinforce the impression that critics and "criticism" in literary journalism have followed the lead of academic critics in forswearing the "literary" in literary criticism in favor of more socially "relevant" issues. In academic criticism these issues are like to be explicitly political, whereas in cultural criticism as practiced by Oyler and Rothfeld (and numerous others), they are broadly cultural: critics should use their powers of discernment and interpretation to "read" the landscape of popular culture. Works of art play a purely symptomatic role in this criticism, as the manifestation of cultural expressions the critic hopes to elucidate. 

Literary works are just one such symptom that might be considered, and, since works of fiction and poetry are not as transparent to this kind of inquiry as other popular forms, they are arguably less useful to the cultural critic as objects of analysis. There are literary critics covering primarily fiction and poetry who take this approach–some of them among the most recognized reviewers and critics–but the works they examine are generally those most likely to mirror the visible currents in popular culture by adhering to recognizable conventions of realism or participating in particular fashions that have caught on among writers themselves. The kind of writing that is neglected in this dispensation, putting aside poetry, which unfortunately goes neglected in the popular press almost as a matter of course, is the very most "literary" writing, that is to say, fiction that is unconventional and experimental, that concerns itself not merely with making fictional representations of reality but exploring different possible ways of creating such representations  through form and style–through questioning how writing becomes literary in the first place.

I am not suggesting that literary criticism must focus exclusively on formally adventurous fiction to be genuinely literary. But even fiction that might be only modestly experimental in its manner isn't likely to get very close attention in the most-read review outlets unless it also is perceived as culturally relevant in its matter (its "content"). Neither do I believe that cultural criticism inherently has less value than the direct examination of literary texts (even if I do myself have more interest in the latter). The development of digital and electronic technologies has certainly brought us to a point where popular culture has become more widely dispersed and more insistent. It would obviously be shortsighted to ignore it. Yet there is an important difference between attending to a phenomenon because it has clear and measurable (and often adverse) effects and doing so because that phenomenon has been deemed more worthwhile than all others. Serious writers are more worthy of consideration than lifestyle gurus, and serious criticism should reflect that. 

Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters–the only characters–are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could  be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.

These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:

    Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.

This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.

Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making–or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation–the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")–remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.

Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects: 

     A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.

     She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.

The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.

Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that  brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.

No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.

That we live in a ubiquitously connected electronic world is by now such a firm fact of 21st century life that it hardly seems worth noting, no matter how much we worry it may be altering the nature of human experience in ominous ways. Diminished attention spans and a narrowed conception of social relations may indeed be among the consequences of the ascendancy of the internet, but there is currently not  much reason to believe its reach will soon be curtailed by our concerns about these matters. The story of how the world we inhabit increasingly became a cyberspace is certainly incomplete, although that space is likely to become more all-encompassing, as the serviceability of online technology continues to be extended and refined.

A recent book focusing on the story so far, Extremely Online (Taylor Lorenz), contends that the internet has taken its present form not so much through the efforts of those developing the technology but the collective efforts of users who through their resourceful adaptations of the possibilities offered by the internet enhanced its character and shaped its ethos. Although the book emphasizes the evolving economic dominance of the internet and the cultural impact of "influencers," it maintains that "the web" served as a means of expression not previously so widely available and empowered enterprising individuals to create novel forms of communication and association. 

If the influencer addressing popular subjects of widespread interest could ultimately accumulate a very large audience, smaller communities of interest might also begin to appear through this new mode of connection. Thus arose what came to be called the "blogosphere," that domain of cyberspace occupied by versions of the weblog, the form of online communication that became the first manifestation of the web's capacity to produce new channels of discourse that bypassed the officially sanctioned practices to be found in print publications. One of the variants of the blog was the literary weblog, or "litblog," which, as the name suggests, was concerned with books and literary culture, although eventually some litblogs focused even more particularly on various eras of literary history or on specific literary forms.

Litblogs still exist, but many of the blogs that initially brought attention to the phenomenon of litblogging do not, or have been modified into more general literary websites. At first, litblogs were pretty closely tied to the established print media that devoted space to books coverage and other literary news. Blog posts were usually quite brief, often mostly links to print sources, and were largely intended to provide wider access to developments in the literary world. As more readers became aware of the early blogs, and the number of blogs began to proliferate (often launched by these very readers), the comments section of litblogs became more active as well, as the common practice of offering a "blogroll" identifying other blogs and bloggers engaged in what increasingly seemed a common project, served to create an informal community of readers, whose interest in books, and literature more generally, were evidently not being adequately satisfied by the mainstream literary press. 

Soon enough, then, just linking to reviews or noting daily literary developments started to seem a limited use of the weblog's potential, and litblogs began to feature more substantial commentary, still mostly informal in tone and relatively modest in length, but attempting to augment the consideration of literary matters rather than simply relating it through links. This happened as more people joined the litblogosphere, from a variety of backgrounds but seeming to share a belief that the blog as a medium presented an opportunity for both a broader and deeper engagement with books and writing than the existing hierarchy of the "mainstream media" could accommodate. Among the new bloggers were academic literary critics testing out the form, some as a forum for amplifying their academic work, but others writing about literature more directly, either as a supplement to academic writing or in some cases an alternative to academic criticism in its then current version.

I myself belonged to this group of converts to the litblog (although I decided to adopt the form relatively early, when only a few of those who would become the most recognized of the early litbloggers had already established their blogs, bloggers such as Maud Newton, Laila Lalami, and Mark Sarvas). My goal in starting The Reading Experience from the beginning was to see if serious literary criticism could be carried out on a blog. As I tried to suggest through the name I chose for the blog, I was attempting neither to use the site as a way of providing a broader context for my work as an academic critic, nor to turn it into an outlet for an academic criticism modified to a new medium. Instead I imagined the weblog and its growing audience as a potential opportunity to bridge differences between the kind of academic criticism I had learned to practice and a more general-interest criticism that attempted to reach a larger, less insular audience but emphasized the analytical as much as the evaluative.

I would not say that my motivation was strictly shared by other bloggers who helped expand the scope of the litblog. My posts on The Reading Experience were likely the product of my own idiosyncratic notion of what a "literary" blog could be, although I did receive enough encouragement from readers and other bloggers about my approach–encouragement that indeed may have been prompted by a perception that what I was doing was something different–that I felt sufficiently motivated to do almost all of my writing on the blog (no more academic articles or lengthy literary essays pitched to whatever publication might seem a promising target). At first I didn't really write many straight-out reviews, as the goal was not to reproduce mainstream book review discourse but to develop a less formalized kind of commentary that still offered more than facile judgments of either praise or disapproval.

Many of the posts I wrote in the early days of the blog were in fact not close readings of individual works at all. They were instead direct reflections on the practice or criticism that, at least in retrospect, were more like lectures than book chat. Indeed, I now cringe somewhat at the rather high-handed manner of some of these posts whenever I re-read them, although perhaps the tone seems high-handed because it is no longer so unusual to find an elevated level of discourse on blogs and websites devoted to literature and literary discussion. Such discourse can take for granted that its audience shares assumptions and expectations, but since I really didn't know what knowledge or interest my readers actually brought to the perusal of my blog, I chose to address them as just the sort who would be receptive to the kind of analysis and appraisal I hoped my blog could provide–curious and intelligent, but otherwise more accustomed to the existing norms of mainstream literary journalism.

I can't exactly say that I had in mind from the beginning to overthrow these "norms" of mainstream critical writing, but gradually this did indeed more or less become an implicit–in some cases explicit–ambition as The Reading Experience became more established. (Given the low traffic this blog presently attracts, I am always rather astonished to look back at the user numbers from its early years–although my blog was not among the very most popular litblogs, from my current perspective those numbers nevertheless seem huge.) And in this I believe I can say I was joined by a significant number of other litbloggers for whom "mainstream" increasingly became a term of abuse. Certainly through distinguishing ourselves from mainstream print publications we were engaged in a fair amount of self-promotion, setting ourselves up as "alternative" sources of information and judgment (even though more often than not the information came from the print sources we otherwise disdained). Yet I do think that as a whole this early group of litbloggers (a snapshot of my blog's blogroll from the time can be found here) did share an enthusiasm for literary works, new and old, that were outside mainstream reading habits and that did not merely reinforce the dominance of the biggest publishers.

This broader orientation was ultimately reflected in the creation of a cross-blog alliance we called (somewhat clumsily) the "Litblog Co-op" (link). This group in its mission statement explicitly declared itself to be "uniting the leading literary blogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors, and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." Ultimately the co-op's activities were largely restricted to making a quarterly selection of one new book to be highlighted through a prize-like announcement on the group's collective website and accompanied by individual posts related to the selection, written by various members. (These weren't always laudatory. I myself registered a couple of dissenting views regarding the selected books.) The endeavor was short-lived: the first "Read This!" selection was made in 2005, and by 2007 the group disbanded. 

In retrospect, this project was clearly enough an attempt by the "leading" litbloggers both to reinforce their status as a vanguard of sorts in the rise to prominence of the literary weblog and to certify the litblog as the successor to print-dominated literary journalism. The first ambition was perhaps temporarily fulfilled, but even during the two brief years of the group's existence, new literary blogs continued to emerge, and while to an extent the LBC (as we referred to it) tried to accommodate this reality by periodically adding new members, that this endeavor finally could only reinscribe the hierarchical order against which the literary blogosphere was supposedly standing seems perfectly obvious now, and this would have become a debilitating contradiction even if the Litblog Co-op had continued a while longer. The second aspiration likewise could be dismissed as mostly presumption and hubris, except that the underlying supposition was in fact ultimately confirmed: the litblog itself did not become the successor to print journalism as the primary source of literary discussion, but the blog did prove to be the herald of a large-scale migration of serious literary discourse from existing print publications to various kinds of literary-focused sites online.

Intellectual discussion of numerous other subjects also appeared with more regularity both on blogs and in other web-based forms, but the resistance to the idea that substantive literary journalism and criticism (aside from informal "book chat") might be carried out on the internet was particularly strong and persisted longer–except when such resistance just disappeared. Many if not most of the literary blogs associated with the LBC began posting less often and eventually stopped altogether. I myself put The Reading Experience on an extended hiatus, and when I decided to bring it back, the audience for a blog such as mine had clearly diminished. But in the meantime other websites centered on literature and literary criticism had appeared and were replicating the kind of close monitoring of developments in the book world that litblogs had supplied. They were also more like conventional publications with a "staff" of writers and editors rather than the personal journals of the proverbial bloggers in their pajamas. And not only were the legacy print publications no longer condescending to online literary conversations but soon enough were themselves joining in with their own blog-like venues, such as the New Yorker's "Page-Turner."

New web publications offering thoughtful longer-form literary criticism–mostly in the form of book reviews but not necessarily confined to reviews–also began to appear with some frequency, and when I began to less frequently update The Reading Experience, I turned to these publications to pursue my own continuing interest in cultivating a kind of criticism that had intellectual credibility without simply mirroring the periodical book review or the academic essay. Luckily there were a number of web-based publications that allowed me to do this, such periodicals as The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, 3:A.M. Magazine, and Full Stop. Writing for these outlets was, on the one hand, fully comparable to writing for traditional print publications–being assigned a review or making a pitch for one, working with an editor–but on the other felt more like enhanced blogging. The books included for review were much more varied than in mainstream book review sections, including more books in translation and from smaller presses, and the editors demonstrated a greater interest in unconventional, adventurous works. Reviews were less formulaic, with a greater tolerance for longer and more digressive analysis, while some reviewers made their reviews less formal and more personal as compared to typical newspaper and magazine reviews. Still, these web publications maintained a relationship to the reading audience that was closer to the one-way communication enforced by traditional print newspapers and periodicals. They brought in a wider  range of contributors, but there were few of the interchanges between wrier and reader that on occasion enhanced the discourse on literary blogs. 

Like literary blogs themselves, these initial online book reviews went through a process of waxing and waning. Some of them are now discontinued or curtailed in their scope. What seems like a fresh opportunity to develop more a capacious kind of literary criticism generates some enthusiasm, but that enthusiasm can't compete with the greater resources devoted to subsequent sites that appropriate the approach taken by those who established the practice, while redirecting the coverage and focus of interest to a broader consideration of literary culture (and culture in general) and ultimately a more mainstream audience. And gradually the new literary websites come to seem in their organization and outlook more like the sort of conventional literary organs we bloggers wanted to challenge.

While some of us had entertained fantasies of some such consortium of litblogs as the LBC replacing conventional literary organs, the kind of web publication that evolved during the 2010s actually did replace them. There is no doubt that the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement continue to be the most prestigious and influential standalone book reviews, but they are indeed standing pretty much alone among newspaper book reviews. The book review sections of most newspapers have either been eliminated or severely cut back, and the New York Review of Books is about the only remaining independent print publication in the United States exclusively offering book reviews. Magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic still offer book reviews, but I daresay most readers access these publications online and experience them as essentially another online site. The extent to which this erosion is due to the increased availability of online book review websites is debatable, but there is no doubt that competition from the internet has contributed to it. Coverage of books, and the arts more generally, seems to has substantially been left to web-based publications.

Certainly it is not the case that literary commentary has migrated to the web simply because it has been abandoned by financially straitened print publications. The quality of the commentary is indeed high in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and Public Books, arguably as high or higher than it ever was in all but the most distinguished print magazines. In these publications it can perhaps be said that the potential for the online medium not merely to reproduce the literary discourse of traditional print criticism but to augment or supersede it is realized. But in the process, they have also recreated the rhetorical situation in which pre-web criticism was produced, with status and authority invested in the editorial distinction presumed by the publication itself, which in turn confers it on the critics and reviewers featured. Even when the subjects covered in these journals are associated with mass entertainment rather than works of high seriousness, a kind of highbrow importance is still attached to the analysis provided, with little or no audience participation encouraged.

Arguably there is a need for criticism and commentary that offers an authoritative perspective, supported by the critic's manifest knowledge and critical acumen. Any perceived distance between critic and readers or even critic and other critics is less important than the model of serious reading provided by the most committed critics. The sorts of critical sites I have mentioned are more likely to feature critics whose primary calling is as a critic rather than a fiction writer, and the underlying motivation for much of what is published in them more often seems to be first of all as an exercise in critical understanding, not the provision of consumer information, as continues to be the case with the majority of newspaper book reviews. Neither do they focus so relentlessly on just the currently "newsworthy" releases, and what coverage there is of foreign titles in American book review spaces is largely found in online publications. In all of these ways, a good deal of the literary criticism published online redeems the proposition inherent to the early litblogosphere  that the internet could serve as a medium for substantive engagement with literature.

Yet even if consequential literary criticism can now abundantly enough be found online, the evolution of online literary discourse from the blog to highbrow online journals has taken us from the possibility that a critical space might be created for a different kind of criticism, neither "general" (although accessible) nor "academic (although serious-minded), to a reoccupation of such space by critical writing that is intellectually credible but almost as insular and remote as the mainstream establishment practices against which the literary blogosphere reacted in the first place. In their commission of reviews and choice of critics, they are just as likely to to apply the criteria conventionally used to produce "interesting" pieces–interesting in subject or theme but not necessarily focused on pure literary interest–and to "match" the book under review to reviewer with the right credentials or a currently high profile. While book reviews and literary commentary certainly pay very little, attitudes have shifted back to the assumption that "real" reviews are those that are paid, with the accompanying inference that such reviews are credible because they are published through a reputable editorial process. In short, the literary weblog may have prepared the way for a critical writing about literature online that not just rivalled but eventually exceeded both in quantity and depth what had been available in general-interest print publications, but in the end it has reconstructed the apparatus that makes literary commentary an elite practice.

This was perhaps inevitable. Just as the internet itself was consolidated into the American media system (and into the capitalist system as a whole), the literary version of this system seized on the developing online modes of communication and was able to dominate them. Resistance to this takeover was not very strenuous, as writers, as they always will, sought readers, as well as recognition from perceived authorities, and critics sought to be recognized as such authorities. Looking back at it, it seems pretty clear that my early blogging colleagues not so secretly hoped that the increasing attention paid to them as bloggers would ultimately lead them to opportunities in the establishment media we were supposedly challenging (and I don't exempt myself from having such thoughts). A significant number of them succeeded in their ambitions, and some of them now occupy prominent places in that since-transformed establishment. I am perfectly happy with their success, but I am undecided whether finally I consider ti a sign of the larger triumph of literary blogging or a token of its surrender.

Although perhaps the real surrender of blogging occurred with the rise of social media, but most especially Twitter. It is almost certainly true that Twitter appropriated from the early blogs the short digest form of post–usually brief notices of literary news, often joined to some  pointed commentary, or sometimes just a brief outburst of opinion. This sort of proto-microblogging was, in fact, popularly associated with blogging at first, serving a function similar to Twitter but without the centralized address. The one-stop convenience of Twitter eventually rendered digest posts superfluous, and when Twitter and other social media sites began developing their own books-based communities, there was no longer a reason to visit litblogs that primarily featured these Twitter-like posts. Many of those blogs simply ceased activity, and the literary blog itself more or less faded from prominence as a phenomenon of literary culture.

Individual blogs by writers focused on literature of course persist, but few of them maintain any kind of steadily high traffic, although this is not really the ambition behind most of them. Unlike the early blogs, they don't really seek to challenge existing literary discourse but to provide an alternative for readers not keenly attuned to it. Some are more narrowly specialized–Neglected Books, The Untranslated–while others allow their authors to register their ongoing responses to the books they read (fulfilling one of the paradigmatic functions of litblogging). Those seeking a larger audience have instead turned to Substack, which (along with other, similar newsletter services) takes the writer's efforts directly to the reader via email rather than waiting for readers to arrive–a blog on wheels, perhaps. To some extent the popularity of Substack as a way of  distributing blog-like writing suggests that the impulse originally satisfied through the development of the weblog still motivates writers and would-be writers to take advantage of internet technology to circumvent traditional modes of publication. On the other hand, both phenomena might just be evidence of the way in which the technology creates the need for its use. Surely the growth of Substack has encouraged the proliferation of newsletters covering less-than-urgent topics, and it is likely we will reach a point of diminishing returns for the paid newsletter, as readers reach their limit in spending on subscriptions.

At the least, however, the technology did make available an opportunity to create an "in-between" kind of literary discourse (in between a purely personal reading journal and officially sanctioned literary criticism) open to the unmediated discussion of books and writing, separate from the constraints imposed by established literary journalism as well as academic criticism. (And when literary journalists and academic critics did come to participate in the blogosphere, it was usually according to the protocols attached to blogging, not the other way around, as at, for example, an "academic" blog called The Valve, to which I was a contributor for several years.) But as audiences grew and the lure of profit beckoned (although we now know that this prospect has turned out to be an illusion), the technology changed ("improved"), and the conditions on the ground, so to speak, also inevitably changed, The blog would turn out to be only the initial step in transferring American literary culture online; the simple tools of blogging alone would prove inadequate to such an epochal task.

If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place.

There are no doubt fictional protagonists more reprehensible than the main character of Dave Fitzgerald's Troll (Humbert Humbert comes to mind), but most of these do not necessarily consider themselves morally blameworthy–they are often self-deceived or simply blind to their own shortcomings. The unnamed protagonist of Troll (not quite the narrator) knows very well that he is an impossible jerk; being an asshole is, in fact, at the very core of his identity, the condition to which he relentlessly aspires in order to give his life purpose. Although occasionally we get fleeting glimpses of the better person he might have been (but probably can no longer be), his role in the novel is to perpetually demonstrate his lack of concern for others or, if he does momentarily try to reassert some latent dignity, to inevitably revert to a fundamental boorishness he can't suppress, 

This strategy of character development is a fairly radical move at a time when "likability" in characters has been elevated to an inviolable principle among readers (and too many writers) of fiction, even more so in a novel of more than 500 pages in which the protagonist is really the only important character. Fitzgerald should at least be given credit for chutzpah in this effort, but in fact the very audacity of his extended exposition of objectionable behavior is itself compelling and gives the novel its own kind of narrative drama ("will he ever wise up?). For those who value fiction that unsettles expectations of the form rather than reinforces the reader's self-contented comfort, a novel like Troll provokes us to reflect on the relationship between reader and character in fiction: can we hold the character in contempt and still enjoy the writer's way of creating the character? We would not likely want to interact with the protagonist of Troll in real life, but a novel is artifice, an illusion summoned through language, and to judge such a character by degrees of "likability" seems an unnecessarily restrictive perspective on the value of a work of fiction.

Often a novel featuring a morally dubious or otherwise unsavory character confronts us directly with this character through the use of first-person narration. (Again Lolita comes to mind, or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.) Simple proximity to the character through extended, intimate acquaintance with the narrative voice can deceive us into overlooking the character's more deplorable qualities or to seize on those better qualities we think we perceive beneath the surface of the character's literal actions. We are in effect tricked into feeling some affinity with the character, perhaps to later learn the depth of our gullibility. Fitzgerald denies himself the use of this trick in favor of what seems an even more brazen one: Troll directly implicates us in the actions of its protagonist by adopting second-person narration. This presumably would imply that we should restrain our impulse to despise the narrator because we too might share some of his human flaws. Except that such an interpretation can't really encompass passages such as this: 

Your attention to hygiene is close to laughable. You bathe only when you've accumulated a noticeable filth, deodorize only when you can actually smell yourself, and brush your teeth only when they start to hurt (a task which reliably makes your ill-defined bicep sore before you reach your back molars). Your razor makes but cameo appearances, usually after your beard has already overgrown your neck and invaded the softer allopatrics of your chest hair. . . .

This still seems to be the representation of a particular person, so particular that surely most readers would find it difficult to regard the character as a kind of Everyman figure close enough to themselves that they could be included as his shadowy surrogate simply through being addressed as "you." The better account of this novel's point of view would take it as a kind of internally split perspective: The protagonist addresses himself in the second person, perhaps to avoid fully claiming the behavior related, as would happen with a first-person narration–perhaps it is the protagonist-as narrator's only way of maintaining his moral scruples in the face of the evidence he presents of moral degradation. While some of the protagonist's errors–most conspicuously his immersion in the worst excesses of online culture (thus the most immediate derivation of the novel's title) and his slackerly wallowing in the mindless comforts of pop culture–are certainly shared widely enough by some in the protagonist's generational cohort, satire of our current cultural follies, although present, is not the novel's exclusive ambition. Its protagonist is finally not a cautionary figure only.

Is the online troll purely a product of the ubiquity of online culture, a creature summoned through the simultaneous visibility and anonymity it allows? Were these creatures always already out there, waiting for this opportunity to show themselves? Or has the internet in its assorted varieties simply created them ex nihilo? In some ways the protagonist of Troll is a quintessential troll, trollish online and off-, but while his behavior finds its specific expression in the forms promulgated by the wired world, surely it is not simply the product of those forms. Online culture has given him the opportunity to postpone adult responsibility, to waste whatever writing talent he might possess on a clickbait factory called GRUNDL, where he composes the lists of top ten this and top then that of the sort that blights online discourse, and to inhabit porn and dating sites where he might indulge his libidinal inclinations without ever much encountering actual women in person (when he does, the encounters work out terribly, especially for the women).

It seems unlikely that this character would have turned out to be an accomplished writer, or even a well-functioning grownup, if the internet hadn't screwed him up. We might say that Troll shows us exactly how current electronic media warps vulnerable personalities, or how easily it can do that,  but at its core the novel is the story of a failed writer and would-be intellectual with poor social skills who really doesn't even seem to get much pleasure out of his self-indulgent profligacy. He might seem to belong to the line of modern antihero protagonists, except that there's really nothing "roguish" about his actions. He does stay true to his antisocial disaffection, but this is because finally he can't resist giving in to his worst impulses. Even after he apparently does come to a final reckoning with the fatuity of his life at the end of a long essay he writes as a farewell to his readers at GRUNDL, he can't avoid further perpetrating an entirely gratuitous offense against public decorum that nearly gets him killed.

The quality of thought and style on display in this farewell essay (the longest but not the only sample of the protagonist's writing incorporated into the narrative) suggest that the protagonist is capable of sustained analysis and not without writing skills. Indeed, the writing throughout Troll (which is wholly consonant with what we find in this essay, again suggesting the authors are one and the same) is fluent but colloquial and often pungent, and is finally the main reason why this long novel about an unpleasant character continues to reward our attention. It is part of the protagonist's dysfunction that he devotes his critical efforts to evanescent pop cultural distractions such as the tv show, Friends, but the accomplishment of Troll is to make this dysfunction artistically functional.

Mircea Cartarescu's Solenoid is a work of antirealist fiction whose very departures from verisimilar representation are really strategies for getting closer to reality through the devices available to the literary imagination. In Solenoid, these strategies contribute most of all to an hallucinatory yet undoubtedly truthful portrait of the city of Bucharest, home both to the novel's protagonist and to the author, each in their representations of the city (the protagonist through the journal that is the vehicle of Cartarescu's narrative) seemingly appalled by its degradation during the Ceausescu years but also in a kind of awe at its ancient, dilapidated grandeur. The former is frequently evoked in straightforwardly realistic descriptions of the ruinous state of Bucharest's exterior facades, but the latter is a cumulative impression emerging from the protracted reveries into which the narrator just as often falls.

During these episodes, the narrator recounts events from his own past as well as current experiences, related in obsessive detail, that can quickly veer into distorted dreamscapes. The recounted moments from the past are themselves often dreams, or at least waking visions, that the narrator is transcribing from old journals in which these visions are recorded into a new and all-encompassing journal the completion of which the narrator regards as a kind of culminating act in his own failed career as a writer. (Current happenings are also chronicled  in this journal, which serves as the novel's structural conceit, an omnibus memoir of sorts. Among the most prominent of these dream episodes are those that report on spectral visits by mysterious figures who hover around the narrator in the night. They are related as real-life hauntings by apparitions, but they nevertheless reinforce the blurring of the real and the imagined that ultimately characterizes the novel as a whole, although they also more explicitly locate the source of this drift from reality to the perceptions of the narrator himself.

We might then say that the "realism" of a novel like Solenoid is really a version of psychological realism, except that this concept wouldn't really do justice to Cartarescu's full-scale literary rejection of a boundary between what's real and what's imagined. This is apparent as well in the other two books by Cartarescu available in English translations, Nostalgia and Blinding (Book One). These books also freely blend straightforwardly realistic narratives with blatantly surreal and fantastic scenes, both approaches as with Solenoid in the service of experiences that seem autobiographical, although the autobiographical elements are themselves not the center of interest. Cartarescu seems to be using the circumstances of his own like as the means for executing a literary method that is faithful to those circumstances (just as in the depiction of Bucharest) by amplifying their routine qualities into fully fantastic scenes of grotesque fancy. 

Of the three books, Solenoid is the most formally integrated. The translated edition of Blinding is only the first part of a trilogy, while Nostalgia may be more a collection of novellas (united by an authorial presence and their setting in Bucharest) with disparate characters and stories. Although Nostalgia achieves it own kind of aesthetic unity-through-disjunction, Solenoid retains the episodic, digressive impulses animating both Nostalgia and Blinding while its unity is made visible rather than merely imminent, the novel's form a function of its point of view but for that reason more immediately present in the reader's perception of its aesthetic order. If Solenoid is less formally open-ended that the two previously translated works (and thus arguably less audacious), it is also less diffuse in its effect.

Solenoid is also more purposefully focused on character development, partly again a function of its use of the protagonist's journal as narrative vehicle, but however much the novel offers a dynamic portrayal of Bucharest, it also gives us a psychologically dense account of the narrator, still temperamentally the career writer he deliberately refused to become after experiencing initial hostility to an apprentice poem he wrote for a writing workshop during his student days. ("I have never recovered from the trauma," he tells us in introducing the incident.) Instead, he is a Romanian teacher at a run-down Bucharest high school, the drudgery of the job also depicted in the novel with an unforgiving realism that ultimately seems almost preternatural in its desolation. If Cartarescu's practice can be called "magical realism," it is a kind of magic that has his characters literally bewitched, forced to live in a kind of benumbed trance. Such conditions force the narrator into the recesses of his own mind, but "during the endless series of evenings when, as my silent room darkens, my mind rises like the moon and glows brighter and brighter" and "I see palaces and hidden worlds on its surface, things never revealed to those running inside the maze." 

Although Solenoid is set during the reign of Ceausescu in Romania (as are Nostalgia and Blinding), there are explicitly only fleeting references to the political dispensation in place at the time. Readers innocent of Cold War-era Romanian history (perhaps a sizable enough group) could read Solenoid without fully registering the oppressive reach of the Ceausescu regime, which is nevertheless tacit in the near-ruins of the urban landscape the narrator confronts and the abject resignation palpable in most of the city's residents. The oblique depiction of the specific political circumstances in which the narrator of Solenoid must operate might persuade us to think that Cartarescu intends his novel to be read as a parable of sorts, something akin to Kafka although more firmly embodied in the particularities of place, its politics only nominally suggested, not fully apparent. But Solenoid's narrative structure does not seem allegorical: Cartarescu's narrator is really interested in social and political circumstances only as backdrop to his epic-length self-interrogation.

Solenoid's protagonist is obsessed with his own life not out of narcissism or self-satisfaction but because he finds his own life as grotesque and unaccountable as the city of Bucharest itself. He conceives his journal–the book we are reading–as "a report of my anomalies," which requires the discontinuous, hallucinogenic treatment we encounter in the novel, although the narrator insists he is sticking to the facts of his life, even if these facts are but "vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, vague discrepancies." One could ask, however, whether the flashes the narrator provides are all that vague, the little fissures he exposes very little. In its juxtaposition of the banal and the incredible, Solenoid casts doubt on our rigid separation of the palpably real and the presumably fantastic, insinuating that each in itself is only a partial measure of the truth, which occupies the permeable border between the two. The narrator directly suggests that our perceptions of reality are inherently limited when he contemplates at length theories of a possible fourth dimension that human beings are unable–yet–to access. Signs of these limitations recur throughout the novel in the hidden spaces and labyrinthine passageways the narrator frequently encounters (including in his own home).

Finally the narrator of Solenoid is more concerned with ultimate questions such as the nature of reality and the meaning behind its surfaces, rather than more temporal cultural and political matters, and he finds a preoccupation with such larger perplexities in a semi-organized group called the Picketists, who hold demonstrations outside places like the morgue. But these are not political protests. Instead the Picketists carry signs that say such things as "Down with Death," 
"Shame on Epilepsy," and "NO to Agony!" At the first rally the narrator attends, the group's ostensible leader demands to know

Why do we live?. . .How can we exist? Who allowed this scandal, this injustice? This horror, this abomination? What monstrous imagination wrapped consciousness in flesh? What sadistic and saturnine spirit permitted consciousness to suffer like this, permitted the spirit to scream in torture? Why did we climb down into this swamp. this jungle, into these flames full of hate and anger?

It is perhaps tempting to think that the ingenuous Picketists are ultimately an object of satire or parody, but in Cartartescu's fictional world it would be more accurate to say that the usual forms of social protest, demands for sublunary justice, are the real expressions of credulity and naivete. The narrator doesn't exactly become a Picketist, but their insistence that the real world of ordinary existence is utterly senseless closely aligns with his own preoccupation with his "anomalous" life and his perception that true meaning is to be found beyond mundane reality.

Still, Solenoid nevertheless often lingers on the details of its protagonist's mundane reality. We frequently return to his far from anomalous vocation as a high school teacher, with its tedious and unsatisfying routines. The narrator is romantically involved with a fellow teacher, Irina, and their trysts are chronicled at various points in the novel. (Later we get the narrator's account of his previous failed marriage, an experience which clearly still puzzles him as another "anomaly.") These trysts are enhanced by a phenomenon whose source gives the novel its title: beneath his "boat-shaped house," he has discovered, is buried a massive solenoid, the electromagnetic effects of which create a force field of some sort that allows him and Irina to literally float above his bed during their episodes of lovemaking. There are other solenoids buried in various places around Bucharest, so that some of the extravagant, surreal goings-on related in Solenoid could be taken as the influence of these amplified solenoids, acting on a metaphorical level as a kind of fanciful conceit. The conceit is able to encompass both the novel's unsparing realism and its detours into the eerie and absurd, allowing it at once to be a visionary work of sustained surrealism and a rigorous exercise in verisimilitude.

This achievement is, of course most immediately attributable to Solenoid's narrator, who is, after all, summoning this blend of veracity and fantasy in organizing and completing his journal. Although the narrator presents himself as a failed writer, and one whose failure was provoked by his work as a poet and not a writer of fiction, the novel nonetheless unavoidably acknowledges its fictional world as artifice, the calculated manifestation of writing. But if Solenoid could be called a large-scale work of metafiction, it is not of the unabashedly self-reflexive kind that is sometimes characterized as "fiction about fiction." Instead, the metafictional elements act as an enabling device making the novel's merging of the representational and the surreal more seamless, not simply an amalgam of realism and fantasy. Ultimately Solenoid–and Cartarescu's fiction in general–makes no significant distinction between the ostensibly factual and the blatantly fictional, but this is more than an exercise in reality-bending: it is an implicit assertion of fiction's truth-telling potential beyond the prescriptions favoring narrative plausibility and literal representation.

At the end of Solenoid, the narrator begins to burn his now-completed manuscript–the last scenes describe an apocalyptic during which the city of Bucharest rises into the sky, revealing a Lovecraftian horror lying beneath–and prepares to seek a new home with Irina and their unborn child where "we will grow old together." This clearly implies a happy ending beyond the nightmarish vision the narrator's writing had evoked, but of course the narrator's action introduces a narrative dilemma: if indeed the manuscript has been destroyed, how then have we been able to read it? We could regard the text's self-immolation as the narrator's sleight-of-hand, a way of providing his story with a narrative closure that resolves his conflicted feelings about writing with an especially emphatic renunciation. Or we could accept the device as the final confirmation of the novel's metafictional presuppositions, an acknowledgement that the narrator and his baroque journal are the author's fabrication, the vehicle for an elaborate counterfactual tale depicting the author's life had he not in fact become a successful writer.

Even so, Solenoid's protagonist certainly does not exhibit diminished skills in his abilities as a writer. Indeed, we could say that the narrator of Solenoid, free of the distractions that might have come with literary success, is able to exercise his poetic gifts in their purest state, untainted by worldly concerns, especially if he knows that what he writes is destined to have no readers. His prose, as translated by Sean Cotter, is characterized by a scrupulous attention to detail, even when the objects of his attention seem unearthly, related in rhythmically propulsive sentences. (One assumes these are qualities of Cartarescu's writing that Cotter has accurately rendered in his translation–at any rate, this English version of the novel is altogether compelling in its style.) However much the narrator of Solenoid wants to affirm the value of life over writing, as the embodiment of Mircea Cartarescu's value as a writer, he is among the most dedicated of writers.

The newest issue (issue 6) of my Substack book review, Unbeaten Paths, is now available. This issue focuses on several books published by Corona/Samizdat Press. 

Corona/Samizdat is a (more or less) one-man non-profit literary press founded and operated by the American expatriate writer, Rick Harsch. Physically located in Izola, Slovenia, the press publishes both new unconventional, formally adventurous fiction and out-of-print works by neglected writers–in the press's own formulation, "old works dismissed too early" (website here). This issue is dedicated to recent releases from Corona, although the first review is of a novel by Harsch himself. . . .Continue reading

John Guillory's Professing Criticism is in every way an admirable book. It is deeply learned, sharp in its observations, unquestionably sincere in its effort to rehabilitate and reorganize the study of literature, and above all correct: literary study has indeed lost sight of its original, underlying purpose, has become too dispersed in its curricular organization, and has become helplessly caught in the shifting winds of every new and passing critical trend that comes along. It is poorly situated to resist all the demographic and institutional pressures that are destabilizing its intellectual foundations and probably threatening its continued existence as a university-based discipline. It badly needs to be reconceived and reorganized.

Unfortunately, Professing Literature is not likely to have much effect in bringing about such changes in the curriculum and objectives of academic literary study. For one thing, the book itself is short on practical, concrete suggestions for bringing them about. Most of its analysis is historical and diagnostic, providing a general critique of the current status of literature and literary criticism in the academic curriculum, providing lots of clarity about how the "profession" of literary study came into its present form but otherwise remaining content with vague exhortations about what "must" happen if it is to flourish in the future. Guillory doesn't take names or arrest any suspects when it comes to assigning responsibility for the increasingly marginal status of literary study in the university. (Although to some extent it shares this status with the humanities in general, as the recent discourse on the "crisis" in the academic humanities would suggest.) He does speculate that the study of literature might in the near future rend itself in two, one strand branching off into the entirely topical, present-oriented focus on identity politics and social justice, while the other, much smaller, branch might still emphasize the "older" works of British and American literature. But it isn't entirely clear whether Guillory himself favors this bifurcation or whether it's just a concession to the inevitable given current conditions on the ground.

Guillory believes that academic critics in their latest iteration overestimate the efficacy of their politically-motivated scholarship, but while offering courses that seek to "affirm" identity or promote social justice might conceivably be more fruitful in their ultimate political effect than academic scholarship inevitably read by few people (raising consciousness at least among those who take the courses), still it is hard to see how continuing with this utilitarian approach to literature is a very promising option in securing the future of literary study. Certainly courses focusing on these issues could continue to be featured in the college curriculum, but by that time they will have little to do with "literary study" per se, which will have essentially disappeared in favor of cultural therapeutics. And at that point "scholarship" on literature will either be beside the point or a thin disguise for political homiletics. Given Guillory's emphasis on the history of literary study's difficulties in establishing itself as a proper "scholarly" discipline against the skeptical attitude that it belongs in the university in the first place, surely this skepticism would only be heightened in such hyperpoliticized circumstances, its status as a "discipline" only more precarious.

Perhaps literary scholarship (in the older sense of scholarship actually about literature) would persist in the vestigial programs focusing on the older array of canonical literary works. But it seems to me that the gap between the goals of these two approaches would eventually be so wide there would be little reason to associate them as merely separate ways of studying literature. The "study" of literature would surely be more appropriately applied to this second form of inquiry, although it also seems likely that this mode of study would come to be regarded as more or less an adjunct to historical studies, something like Classics, for example, ultimately considered a form of antiquarianism. This sundering of the old and the new might further have an effect on what is taken as "literature" in the new dispensation: since such a premium would be put on the personal and the immediate, memoirs and perhaps poetry would seem to be the more fruitful forms to examine, while fiction could become less central. The reduction of fiction to its ethical and political content is already a trend in literary culture more generally, so perhaps there will be some convergence on the idea that "literature" is a vehicle for direct personal "expression."

The most significant consequence of assigning what we now think of as "literature" to a branch of purely historical study would be, paradoxically, the loss of "literary history" in what is still supposed to be literary study. For the inflection of genres or styles on a new literary work to be registered by readers, those readers need to have some familiarity with such genres and styles as visible historically. That history won't disappear, of course, and readers could choose to avail themselves of it, but if the current resistance to the "coverage" of literary periods in the study of literature remains (likely it will only intensify) and eventually wins out entirely in the topical approach, it won't be part of a literary education per se. Writers themselves would have less motivation to situate their work among the practices of writers of the past: why cultivate such influences when they are mostly irrelevant to the immediate needs of personal testimony and unmediated communication? (Again, this way of thinking about writing seems to me already well-advanced.) Literary history will extend back a few decades, including writers still recent enough that their work still sufficiently encompasses current concerns.

It is possible that nothing like what I am describing here will in fact come to pass. Guillory's speculation about a possible future for literary study may be wholly mistaken (although it is not without a basis in current reality), and my own conjectures may just be a reflection of a disillusioned cynicism (if not a thoroughly retrograde point of view). Surely writers would not fully welcome a cultural environment in which their work is likely to become passé even faster than it does now. Perhaps the conflicts between the ancients and the moderns in literary study will not be entirely irreconcilable. Or at least the ancients won't be banished entirely. Probably the status of both literature and literary study will persist for a while in its presently unsettled condition. The one thing I certainly do not see happening is some sort of "reform" of the currently muddled situation that leaves everyone who has contributed to the creation of the muddle very satisfied. The powers that be in the university hierarchy are likely to close the shutters on academic literary study before that happens.