Wayne Booth’s scholarly apologia on behalf of “ethical criticism” in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep (still the most well-known defense of such criticism written by a modern academic critic), is not a plea for the upholding of “morality” in literature—or so, at least, does Booth want to assure us:

The word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance. I am interest in a much broader topic, the entire range of effects on the “character” or the “person” or the “self.” “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it.

Indeed, Booth believes that ethical criticism rigorously and conscientiously carried out is the best way to ward off the censors. By taking seriously the notion that works of literature have actual, palpable effects on readers’ perception of themselves and of the real world they inhabit outside the text, critics will avoid being “trapped” inside unacknowledged critical pieties that only ensure that the battle against censorship will be lost.

However, if “moral judgment” is only a small part of ethical criticism, it is nevertheless still a part. And it does not seem altogether impudent to ask: What really is the point of ethical criticism, define it however broadly you want, if the ultimate objective is not to arrive at a moral judgment? This judgment might be restricted to the individual reader, with no attempt to persuade others to share it, but the impulse to communicate one’s disapproval of a literary work’s moral assumptions or applications is surely a strong one in many people, especially among certain kinds of censorious literary critics. Although it is not Booth’s goal to assist such critics in turning their private moral judgments into socially enforced censorship, the very notion of “ethical” criticism seems to me inherently censorious: The Company We Keep is full of moral judgments about particular works that Booth has come to esteem or disesteem (often having changed his mind from the former to the latter), and while his discussions of these works are often elaborate but never less than thoughtful, I don’t see how they can avoid having an effect that is at least a kind of unofficial condemnation, censuring rather than censoring. Booth may not have directly wanted to discourage us from reading Rabelais because of the moral imperfection of Gargantua and Pantagruel (sexism), but this is inescapably its secondary effect.

Of course, critics discourage readers from taking up a literary work whey they accuse it of aesthetic imperfections as well, but in this case it is being judged by the standard appropriate to them: works of fiction and poetry solicit judgment as literary art, and to assess them as more or less successful is the chief function of criticism (certainly of book reviews). Aesthetic judgment need not be the only or final goal of criticism, but ethical criticism is not merely the analysis of literature in its historical, political, or cultural context. It purports to render a conclusion about the quality of literary work, in effect competing with aesthetic judgment as an arbiter of literary value. However, it is difficult to understand how ethical or moral concerns are, in fact, properly regarded as “literary” values at all. To emphasize the ethical qualities of a work of literature is to be preoccupied with ethics (in the form of morality or a branch of philosophy), not with literature per se,  and criticism becomes merely the vehicle for abstract thinking about “values” in general.

It could fairly be said that many of the “great works” assigned to the literary canon were given that status because they were perceived to be the source of ethical and moral wisdom, or because they dramatized compelling ethical dilemmas. Indeed, works of literature written before the modern era may have been regarded by their audiences as at least partly a prompt for ethical reflection. I would argue, however, that to the extent these works continue to resonate for modern readers they do so as a result of their continuing aesthetic power, not mainly for their moral messages (often religious), which in many cases no longer attracts our attention (I, for one, have this reaction to Paradise Lost.) But, even granting that works of the more or less distant past were presumed to convey moral lessons, fiction (the dominant object of Booth’s ethical scrutiny) steadily developed into a literary form that increasingly discounted moral content in favor of aesthetic complexity (especially in the 20^th century). Booth himself implicitly acknowledges this through his various efforts (most famously in The Rhetoric of Fiction but also in The Rhetoric of Irony, as well as The Company We Keep) to demonstrate that the putative “autonomy” of the text in modern fiction and criticism—polysemous and ironic all the way down—is an illusion, critical dogma, a misreading of the way fiction actually works, Rhetoric is unavoidable and no narrative can be completely ironic. A text that can’t be interpreted can’t be read; “meaning” may vary among different readers, but that doesn’t mean it is nonexistent.

Both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Irony are impressive feats of close reading that in effect try to use the kind of close reading advocated by the New Critics against the New Critics’ intentions to seal off the literary text from intrusions of extra-literary kinds of of analysis (political, biographical, etc.) and thus pry open the text for readings that do indeed question its autonomy. In both books, Booth applies a careful analysis to the texts and practices he considers, and both of them still provide insights into how fiction, and the devices used in fiction, work on readers. The Rhetoric of Fiction remains a book with which serious students of fiction (including writers themselves) should still be familiar. I myself read the book as a neophyte graduate student, who found it an inspiring introduction to serious literary scholarship that revealed to me how sustained thinking about works of literature, done by a critic of Booth’s intelligence and keenness of perception, can enliven out reading of these works, not bury it in jargon and abstraction.

Yet these books ultimately cleared the way for Booth’s transformation in The Company We Keep of the insights he offered there into a manifesto of sorts that magnifies those insights well beyond merely questioning the aestheticism of modern criticism and produces instead a critical program  unambiguously elevating “meaning” above aesthetics. Literary criticism itself is essentially reduced to inspection of a literary work for its ethical correctness, its success or failure made contingent on such inspection. In this way, The Company We Keep has in retrospect become the harbinger of the profound shift of scholarly perspective that has occurred over the past 50 years, by which the academic study of literature has all but banished the aesthetic orientation against which Booth makes his case in favor of a broadly ethical approach (although ultimately the emphasis in current academic criticism is usually specifically political). Most academic critics do not now “read” literary texts as works of art but instead for their meaning, either explicit or latent, the latter of which providing what is now seen as literary analysis.

If The Company We Keep can be identified as a herald of this change in disciplinary mission—from the attempt to construe what is in the text to moving as directly as possible to what is outside it—Booth himself as a critic is still able to maneuver adeptly inside the text. His aim is no to use the literary work to prompt ethical inquiry tangential to literary value but to judge literary value by taking the work’s ethical implications seriously. The Company We Keep includes four extended close readings (as well as other, briefer readings throughout the book) that amply illustrate Booth’s skills in explication and interpretation. His analysis of Rabelais reluctantly concludes that Rabelais’s great work (a term Booth continues to use) is inextricably tainted by its sexism. He defends Jane Austen against the charge that her novels reinforce gender stereotypes in 18^th century England, showing how Austen’s portrayals of male-female interactions already contain an implicit critique of those stereotypes, while his in-depth consideration of Huckleberry Finn comes to more ambivalent conclusions about the alleged racism of Twain’s book, although Booth asserts he does still admire the novel.

The most impressive of these readings is Booth’s account of his reconsideration of the work of D.H. Lawrence (originally delivered as a keynote address to the D. H. Lawrence Society). Booth previously had a, at best, mixed reaction to Lawrence’s novels (liking Sons and Lovers, intensely disliking Lady Chatterley’s Lover), generally finding the “implied author” in them problematic. When he is persuaded to reread Lawrence, he comes to admire his fiction for its capacity to inhabit the various points of view of its characters:

Lawrence was experimenting radically with what it means to lose his own distinctive voice in the voices of his characters, especially in their inner voices. In his practice, all rules about point of view are abrogated: the borderlines between author’s voice and character’s voice are deliberately blurred, and only the criticism of whole tale will offer any sort of clarity to the reader seeking to sort out opinions.

Lawrence in effect gives over his narratives to the perspectives of his characters so that nothing any of them think or say can be attributed to Lawrence’s implied author (or Lawrence himself). Booth considers this a sort of ethical generosity on Lawrence’s part, but Booth’s analysis of how Lawrence employs point of view is also a virtuoso act of literary criticism, ethical or otherwise. His analysis does not necessarily make me more appreciative of Lawrence’s ethical stance, but it does make me better informed about how his fiction works.

The impression left by both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep is that Booth is a critic whose first commitment is to the integrity of literature and to its illumination by criticism, but who also believes that an important measure of that integrity is a literary work’s ethical effects. But not only should the effects produced by the work be acceptable (at worst, benign, at best, virtuous.), but the reader should find its authorial presence reflected in what Booth designates in The Rhetoric of Fiction the “implied author.” Booth is the originator of this term, and his entire ethical project is essentially dependent on it for the trope that lies behind the book’s title: the reader finds (or should find) the implied author to be a “friend,” worthy of our continued attention. Booth goes into great detail about how our relationship with the implied author might approximate the qualities we value in real friendships, so it is a metaphor he takes very seriously—so seriously that he almost regards this implied author (which is itself ultimately a metaphor) as if, ideally, he/she becomes the equivalent of an actual human friend.

This is asking the metaphor to carry a great deal of rhetorical weight—too much, in my opinion. Like so much of Booth’s literary analysis, his postulate of the implied author is ultimately a reaction against the more extreme manifestations in modern criticism of formalist assertions of the independence of the literary work from the author of the work, assertions that isolate the work itself, and just the work, as the object of critical attention. We can speak only about the emergent features of the text itself, not about what the author intended, or what the author believes, or the author’s biographical circumstances. The literary text doesn’t itself “say” anything, doesn’t pronounce its meaning, but leaves the reader to determine how the text might be meaningful in the experience of reading it. Booth finds this an incomplete account of how a literary narrative actually works on us, and a misunderstanding of how most people read, and thus the implied author, who does in fact invoke rhetorical strategies to accomplish a particular effect, and whose overall presence in the reader’s perception of the way those strategies coherently interact prompts Booth to think of this presence as “company.”

If by “implied author” Booth means something like “a narrative presence fashioned by the (real) author or the sum total of the effects the work seems to produce,” then I wouldn’t really have any reservations about using the term as a way of speaking about how we experience a literary text. But Booth wants it to signify something more palpable, more closely associated with the author, even though he maintains there is a distinction between them. Ultimately, however, this seems to be a distinction without a difference: when Booth claims that Rabelais is no longer as worthy of reader’s esteem as he once might have been because of his demeaning portrayals of women, he does not mean we should direct our disapproval at the “implied” Rabelais, the writer’s stand-in, but should regard Rabelais the long-canonic historical figure who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel less charitably (since, after all, the feelings of the “real” Rabelais hardly now seem the proper object of our concern). And simply to think less highly of that book surely doesn’t spare Rabelais as author his comeuppance. The same verdict would be passed down on, say, Dickens if here were in the dock for his perceived infractions. It is not the implied author who would serve the sentence of posterity’s disdain, but Charles Dickens as we who read him now know him (as he exists now only in our reading and discussing him).

Thus Booth’s attempt to keep work and writer separate in his ethical judgments seems just as much an artificial construct as any of those contrived by the modern critics whose overly refined ideas and theories about the interpretation of literature Booth has attempted to discredit. To find a particular work ethically unfit doesn’t necessarily entail an ethical indictment of the writer (the flesh-and-blood person who wrote the book), but it does inevitably taint that writer’s work as a whole: if the Mark Twain who wrote Huckleberry Finn, which literary history as come to designate his greatest work, authored a book that is inescapably racist, what chance that his other books happily avoid this offense? Our estimation of the literary work produced by “Mark Twain,” the name itself now the only living presence of the author available to us, can only be lowered. However much Booth would like his method of ethical criticism to remain a text-based practice and not an ad hominem stricture against the person who wrote the text, the latter is in fact the ultimate effect because it is, among the preponderance of actual readers, the only effect it can have.

The present contingent of academic critics in their efforts to make literary works serve as the vehicles for their own version of ethical criticism, have focused less directly on the moral effects of narratives, concerned instead to find in literary works those elements that affirm (or fail to affirm) a broadly progressive social or political perspective. Perhaps the most consequential difference between ethical criticism as presented in The Company We Keep and the current practice in academic criticism is that Booth’s approach is centered on the interaction between the text and an individual reader, on the reader’s “appreciation” of the work, while academic critics now concern themselves with the appreciation, not of the literary work itself, or even the reader’s possible responses to the work, but of the “issues” at stake in the representations offered in, mostly, fiction (academic critics have more or less lost the ability to interpret poetry, since it doesn’t lend itself as well to analysis that rejects aesthetics), although of their memoir/creative nonfiction sometimes also fills the bill. Booth wasn’t really attempting to inquire into ethical questions outside of their salience to particular works of literature. Today, academic critics focus above all on what is “outside.”

Yet, in suggesting in The Company We Keep that “pure” literary analysis is an illusion, that the literary critic must supplement any kind of formal analysis with a consideration of the work’s ethical ramifications, Booth would return academic literary criticism to the assessment of “content.” Since the usurpation of New Criticism as the paradigm method of academic criticism by, first of all, literary theory, content has increasingly become king. The critic uses the literary narrative to get a glimpse of material historical conditions. The critic seeks to understand the influence of culture by isolating its representations in the symbolic space of literature (along with other forms of symbolic expression). The critic interprets a literary narrative and its depictions of characters in such a way that it reinforces enlightened political values related to race, gender and sexual orientation, etc. Seldon do writers’ aesthetic achievements play a role in these efforts, although at times an underappreciated writer from an underrepresented group does receive critical treatment in order to bring that writer greater recognition in general (usually because of the way this writer reinforces those political values).

Whether Wayne Booth would find these approaches to criticism consistent with his intentions in The Company We Keep seems to me questionable, but these broad changes of approach were already underway when it was published and accelerated in the remaining decade and a half of his life. I can myself recall, at around the time this book was published and I had just completed a graduate education of the kind that may have consisted of the last vestige of the traditional literary curriculum that Booth still took for granted, that in talking to several other instructors in a cohort of us who had taken temporary jobs at a midwestern University (the move to contingent employment in academe was also already underway), many, if not most, of them obviously had different assumptions than me about what “professing literature” should be about. To them, New Criticism was a hopelessly outdated and misbegotten enterprise, enamored of “verbal icons” rather than being engaged with important new ideas or making criticism and scholarship socially relevant.

I thus began my prospective career as a literature professor already feeling old. I was not myself necessarily wedded to New Criticism as the critical method I intended to pursue, but as academic criticism became only more oriented away form an interest in literature to an interest in what other agendas it can be made to serve, I found myself increasingly defensive about the formalist approach exemplified by the New Critics (but not only by the New Critics), even though I could agree that the New Critical insistence on such terms as “autonomy” and “ambiguity” could readily enough slide into dogmatism and that the proscription against sundry “fallacies” threatened to make the method excessively methodical, a matter of following interpretive rules. That an approach that had as its goal to clarify how  a literary text works might be applied too zealously in following its rules does not, however, mean that the fundamental principle animating the approach is invalid. Formalism is arguably the mode of criticism that most completely centers the work of literature itself as the object of critical interest, and while it is certainly true that this need not be the only purpose the literary text might serve for the scholar or critic, to essentially deny it any acceptable place in academic literary study seems a profound overreaction to its alleged limitations.

It almost certainly was part of Booth’s intentions in The Company We Keep to dislodge formalism from its putatively privileged place in postwar academic criticism (although its displacement was happening even as the book was published, but just as surely he did not question the existence of the “art” in the art of fiction—what throughout The Company We Keeps he calls the “power” of literary narrative at its most accomplished, a power for which formalism at its best tries to account. Unfortunately, current academic criticism has not only banished critical formalism from its ranks of acceptable practice, but it has come to deny that literary art has any power that doesn’t derive from its capacity to reveal the material circumstances in which it was produced and thus to raise political awareness of those conditions. It does not attempt to reckon with the aesthetic practice of those writers who are implicitly acknowledged as literary artists, but assumes that the ultimate value of their work lies in raising political awareness of particular issues. Notwithstanding the significance of The Company We Keep as the portent of a major shift in direction in academic literary study, Booth as a critic would still probably seem to most readers encountering his work for the first time to be a pretty old-fashioned, literature-centric literary critic.

My own response to The Company We Keep has changed in the time since it was published. While even then I did not agree with Booth’s insistence on the urgency of ethical criticism, the book seemed to offer a perspective worth taking seriously for a formalist-inclined critic like me, exposing for reappraisal some of the inadequately thought-through assumptions about the distinction between form and content. But when content has so thoroughly overwhelmed formal analysis, and when the only writing about literature by academic critics that has a chance to be published must address narrowly-focused political topics that properly belong to disciplines and interests other than literature, my patience for a criticism that calls for foregrounding ethics has mostly been exhausted. When criticism in what was my field, postwar American fiction (which as “contemporary literature” had to claw its way into the curriculum in the first place) has been so emptied of concern for the integrity of literary writing as a distinctive practice, and when any consideration of an individual writer’s work concentrates on its ultimate social utility as political intervention (as a glance at the latest offerings at the major university presses will demonstrate), it is only reasonable to conclude that academic literary study has all but disappeared in any form its original proponents would recognize. Accuracy in advertising would require  it be renamed to better reflect its revised mission, housed in departments of cultural analysis, activist studies, or whatever other name more correctly describes what academic critics are really up to.

If Wayne Booth could not have envisioned such a development, from my own perspective it seems entirely predictable that a conception of literary study proposing we focus on what’s good for us in the books we read would inevitably lead to the sort of single-mindedly reformist criticism we are getting. Literature itself isn’t really necessary for that kind of exercise, except as a pretext for introducing the subject at hand and reinforcing the critic’s rhetorical purpose, so it is neither surprising that literature has disappeared in the academic discipline that supposedly studies it, nor will it be an irreparable loss to those of us who do value literature if the current implosion of the humanities in academe finally reaches full collapse. I have little confidence that recent efforts to return attention to literature itself (by resuscitating “judgment” or “close reading” or “pleasure”) will meet with much success, so the question will be what do we who still care do in the midst of the rubble.

I do not unequivocally reject the consideration of ethical questions in reading or interpreting works of literature. Readers value what they read in different ways, and a work that provokes ethical reflection in addition to its aesthetic appeal is no violation of the integrity of art—that integrity depends on the work possessing aesthetic appeal in the first place, not avoiding any relevance to real-world concerns. (Deliberately saying nothing would be just as preoccupied with advancing a message as the effort to “say something” in fiction). But the “ethical” critic almost unavoidably must subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical: How can we admire the art when we believe its effects to be harmful? This question has led to a pervasive mistrust of art and artists, not only in literary criticism but in cultural discourse in general. Artists must be and do good rather than make good art.

According to Elif Shafak, fiction "encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times."

I think of all the fiction I have read and ask myself how often what I have read made me think I was accomplishing one of these goals.

Never have I actually experienced empathy, because empathy is something you feel for actual people, and there are no people in fiction at all, only words. Sometimes a work encourages me to share an illusion that people are present, but I am also unable to experience empathy with an illusion.  A work of fiction, at least a work of realistic fiction, attempts to create a representation of human experience, but even if I agree to feel empathy for a particular representation of such experience, I would only be deceiving myself if I pretended that some real act of empathy for real people has occurred.

I am not exactly sure what "oneness" is supposed to mean–I presume some sense of solidarity with my fellow humans–but again it would be extremely weird to think that in reading a work of fiction and its various representations I am experiencing oneness with anyone or anything. Reading fiction is in fact a private, isolating experience, and I am perfectly happy with that isolation if it allows me to intimately connect with a work of art. (So much for "pluralism" as well.)

It is possible that my many years of reading fiction has produced wisdom in me, but this would be wisdom about how to read fiction with more satisfaction and pleasure. If I am supposed to be an example of how fiction has made someone a "wise" person outside of this special context, God help us all.

I assume wisdom is associated with "understanding." Here I can't say that reading fiction has helped me to understand it better, because each work of fiction actually makes different demands on my ability to comprehend what I am reading. If it doesn't do this, if it's easy to understand, that's because it's just a repeat of other works I have read, and this is isn't helpful to me at all. (In fact, I have probably stopped reading it, anyway.) What I can say about the best fiction I have read over what is now many, many (many) years, is that these works have helped me to understand that we will never understand why human beings are as they are and do what they do. (Now that I think of it, if this is actually wisdom, maybe I am wise, after all.)

Maybe I am just a bad person. I know that many other smart and well-meaning people believe that fiction exists to accomplish all of these virtuous tasks (and I guess have made them virtuous), but they all seem to me to transform fiction into bathos and hokum. For some reason, I have a deep-seated aversion to hokum.

 

For American readers, in considering the development of "experimental" fiction during the 1960s and after, we are most likely to focus mainly on American writers- the postmodernists and their successors (the latter probably less well-known than the first generation of postmodernists such as John Barth or Robert Coover.)  In this domain of English-language fiction, British writers have been less dominant, with fewer "name" writers or specific groups inclined to develop experimental forms or challenge stylistic norms, to the point that many readers (and critics) no doubt assume that postwar British fiction did not really produce a notable contingent of experimental writers of fiction. 

Joe Darlington's The Experimentalists (2022) informs us that the view that British fiction ought not to encompass such a practice was (and likely still is) an article of belief within British literary culture itself. The Experimentalists unequivocally confirms the existence in 1960s England of not just a few barmy writers dabbling in experimentation here and there but a quite cohesive group of writers seriously committed to experimental writing who recognized each other as fellow travelers on the experimental path and, for a few years, at least, established a network of reinforcement that attempted to instill some respect for experimental writing in the staid confines of a stuffy literary culture. But the resistance was considerable. In that literary culture in the early 1960s, "many readers and writers had sourced on literary experiment and sought a return to Victorian values" Indeed, "writers like C..P. Snow, Angus Wilson, and Kingsley Amis trod a path that. . .would later [be] describe{d} as 'neo-Victorian,' novels about moral conflicts, usually involving an institution of the establishment such as universities and government departments." Experimentalism was "decadent" and un-British.

This situation was especially frustrating to B.S. Johnson, probably the best-known of the British experimentalists. (Darlington also includes lengthy discussions of Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter, although neither of them were really part of the self-identified group of experimental writers, for whom Johnson, as well as, perhaps, Ann Quin, stand as the representative figures.) If there was a revolutionary voice among the group, ready to defend the cause to the unconverted, it was Johnson, which, as a result, gave him a reputation for being strident and, at times, unpleasant, even to his ostensible friends and allies. Johnson was also arguably the most financially successful of the experimentalists, although Quin's Berg (1964) also did quite well, even though his experiments were probably the most audacious–in particular, his infamous The Unfortunates (1969), the "book in a box," consisting of separately bound sections which can be shuffled in any order the reader wishes. The failure of the experimental movement to extend itself much beyond the early 1970s strongly contributed to Johnson's suicide in 1973, which unfortunately kept his published legacy fairly small: six published novels during his lifetime, plus one posthumous novel, as well as some poems and nonfiction.

Johnson's suicide, of course, followed shortly on that of Ann Quin, whose experimental ambitions were perhaps as bold as Johnson's but whose mental fragility ultimately prevented her from fully realizing those ambitions (four published novels, plus a posthumous book containing a novella and some stories (see my review of the latter). Her Berg may have been the first novel to really call public attention to the rise of a new experimental novel in the U.K., but she was never really able to follow it up with work that was equally successful, either commercially or critically. Her story as cumulatively told by Darlington is a pretty sad one. Although the nature of her mental illness seems never to have been quite diagnosed, she lived a life marked by periods of restless exploration followed by a collapse into confusion and uncertainty Her work may have been the attempt to integrate her psychological experience in a way that avoided conventional expression but that achieved its own artistic order nonetheless. Both the formal devices she employed and many of her characters seek a more adequate means of organizing an unstable reality.

Darlington's account includes numerous other writers either loosely or more directly allied with an emergent movement of which Johnson and Quin are the most visible representatives. Among them are Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns (a close friend of Quin's and author of The Angry Brigade), Giles Gordon, and Maureen Duffy. (Most of these writers are also discussed in Francis Booth's Amongst Those Left: The Experimental Novel 1940-1980, published in 2012. Booth's book is much longer and more discursive than Darlington's, but it also features such writers as Anna Kavan, Nicholas Mosley, and Rosalind Belben, all of whose work surely has some salience to postwar British experimentalism.) Darlington also devotes substantial attention to Eva Figes and Christine Brooke-Rose, the latter of whom surely belongs on any list of important 20th century experimental writers in any language. These discussions of  writers such as Figes and Brooke-Rose (and obviously Quin) underline the centrality of women writers to the British experimental movement of the 1960s, a phenomenon that significantly contrasts with the postmodern episode in American fiction during the same period. Almost all of the major figures associated with the initial wave of postmodernists were male, although in their immediate wake (70s and 80s), notable women experimental writers certainly did begin to assert themselves. Women seem to have been at forefront of literary experiment in the U.K., and most of them saw their commitment to experiment in fiction as closely connected to their noncomformity as feminists.

In general, the British experimentalists saw their unconventional fiction as a manifestation of their broadly radical politics much more directly than the American postmodernists did. This is a conceptual difference that continues to characterize approaches to experimental fiction. For those, like many of the British writers, the disruptiveness to established practice represented by experiment in the literary work is analogous to the disruptiveness of dissenting political views. And while there were politically-charged fictions offered by the American writers (Coover's The Public Burning, for example), for the most part American experimental fiction in the 1960s and 70s devoted its ambitions primarily to challenging the hegemony of unexamined literary conventions per se. This distinction between what might be called the aesthetic mode and the political mode doesn't necessarily imply a difference in quality or scale of experiment, although it does suggest a divergence of motive in the pursuit of experimental goals. Perhaps the main reason the British experimental movement faded from public view after the early 1970s (aside from the loss of Quin and Johnson, which was admittedly crushing) is that, once the topical concerns and political causes many of these writers embraced began to seem dated, so did their work.

However, it is also the case that the American postmodern movement crested at about the same time, although arguably the American writers had more successors who continued to write adventurous fiction that followed the model the first-wave postmodernists established. There are certainly current British writers writing unconventional fiction (Ansgar Allen Paul Griffiths, the writers published by Grand Iota press), but, along with the admirable service the books by Booth and Darlinger provide by highlighting these writers and this period in British fiction, they also remind us that the attention that was given to experimental fiction in the postwar era was short-lived, and British fiction since then has not really been a notable source of experimental writing. Of course, we are also currently in a period in which mainstream literary culture is arguably less hospitable to experimental fiction than it has been in a century.

The Experimentalists is a well-written and informed book that chooses to tell a story about British experimental fiction briskly organized through narrative. For this reason, it should serve as a very effective introduction to readers less familiar with the writers and the movement it chronicles. For those already familiar with some of the figures included, it illuminates the cultural context in which the movement rose and fell and clarifies the relationships among the various writers in a way that confirms that they did share a collective ambition to revitalize literature by developing new literary techniques during what they perceived to be a period of stagnation in British literature. But the story Darlington tells is inescapably elegiac, as a group of gifted writers with admirable intentions are ultimately defeated (as a group, at least) by an indifferent literary establishment, but also their own human weaknesses.

It is hard to imagine that many readers of John Trefry's massive novel, Massive, would attempt to read every word in the book (There really are neither sentences nor paragraphs to "read" in the conventional sense, so it finally is a question of registering each word before moving to the next, assuming some sort of sequential relationship between them.) It doesn't take long to realize that the deviations and discontinuities we encounter in negotiating the text of Massive will make arriving at the "sense" of the words in any linear order both time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. One might continue to scan the pages for the occasional burst of syntactic coherence or the repetition of certain names and subjects (as I did), but finally even the notion that we are "reading" the text doesn't seem quite an accurate description of the experience. 

But nor is it entirely clear that Trefry expects us to read his book in the usual way. The text is nor formatted as conventional prose but is presented in columns (three per page) and, while there is associational overlap among the three columns by which we are invited to read across them, each column essentially develops on its own, although such development is fitful and often interrupted. Occasionally the text is merely strings of names and other words that, absent any consistent narrative or discursive context, convey no meaning beyond their manifestation on the page. These deliberate subversions of the continuity of thought and expression we usually expect the writer's prose to exhibit might be taken as a direct challenge to conventional reading habits, implying a call for a different kind of reading, but Massive seems rather to erect a barricade to the normal act of reading altogether as part of its formal/rhetorical design. 

Amidst the work's seeming structural chaos, more coherent references to characters and situations intermittently emerge, apparently related to the circumstances and fate of the modern Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, whose persecution at the hands of Stalin is evoked in irregularly appearing passages drawing on his experiences (as well as those of his wife, Nadia, and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova), substituting for the Soviet Union a fictional state identified as the ADA. These passages could hardly be said to constitute a "story," but they do allow for a minimal representation of what the book is "about," further allowing us to speculate that other of the book's ostensible subjects might be connected to this larger one, even if such connections remain oblique. We might be further led to perceive a more palpable aesthetic order in Trefry's additional manipulation of the text's typography through alteration of font types, so that the different font types might be aligned with a particular perspective or character (Mandelstam, Akhmatova), but this device is not really carried through clearly and consistently, or at least in a way that readers less familiar with the lives of the Russian writers and other cultural figures whose lives are invoked could fully appreciate.

Readers at all familiar with John Trefry would know that he is an architect by profession and is also the publisher of Inside the Castle press, which publishes both his own books and other formally challenging literary works. Applying principles related to architecture seems to be a central strategy in Trefry's previous novels, Plats and Apparitions of the Living, especially the former, the text of which is "built" on the verbal plats laid out in balanced proportions on each page. The word structures assembled on these plats are both self-sufficient, not paragraphs so much as prose poems, each of which develops a set of images or perceptions, and cumulative, serving together as a more unified impression of a consciousness (perhaps more than one) registering the external environment in which it is situated. The environment is urban Los Angeles, but while we are offered a kind of representation of this urban scene, it is an obsessively subjective one, marked by the disturbance that seems to afflict this perceiving consciousness. We are presented with an architecture not of material structures but of feelings and mental awareness.

Apparitions of the Living is less overtly designed through an association with architecture, although our attention is still conspicuously drawn to page layout–some sections of the book are printed in narrow columns with wide margins, while others are expanded to the usual left/right margins but with bigger margins at the top and bottom (taking on more of the appearance of a square) and extra spacing between the lines of the text (which alternate italicized and unitalicized type.) The latter device is employed to draw a distinction between perspectives and sometimes to highlight speech, but otherwise the typographical arrangements don't seem to serve any particular formal function except to attract attention to space–and the novel does feature in its settings a notable divergence of space. Parts of it takes place in the Western desert, while the other main setting is a multilevel hotel. (Some of the desert scenes move into a motel room, providing yet another contrast with the greater dimensions of the hotel.) Perhaps we could say that the novel seeks to offer an alternative to the inherent linearity of most narrative prose by accentuating the space of the pages as available aesthetic territory for the novelist to explore (although Trefry is not the first writer to attempt this.)

Nevertheless, Apparitions of the Living does offer the reader a discernible narrative, more so than either Plats or Massive, although the events of the story often remain indistinct and the characters involved in the story enigmatic. We are introduced first to the desert landscape, where the body of a young boy lies buried in the sand. The remainder of the book essentially relates how the boy got there–apparently the victim of a kidnapping, aided and abetted by the boy's own mother, Connie. The other participants are two men, Jack and Gyre, the former of whom we meet first and whose sections of the narrative predominate most of the novel. The purpose of the kidnapping is never exactly revealed, but it is not really the point of the narrative, anyway. Most attention is given to the circumstances in and around the motel room in which the boy is held. Although surely the boy suffers, rendering that suffering is also not really the ambition of the novel. Trefry is greatly influenced by the writers associated with the French nouveau roman, and he has cited Michel Butor as the primary inspiration for Plats, while Apparitions of the Living attempts the sort of detached objectivity we find in the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the characters in Apparitions seem distant to us, their emotions concealed, it is because, while the objects of their perception are often intently scrutinized, the emotional content of those perceptions are inaccessible to us.

Still, Trefry's tentative appeal to a discernible story and at least some degree of recognizable character creation doesn't really prepare us for the radical rejection of such conventional methods (however unorthodox in their application) in Massive. Apparitions of the Living suggested that Trefry might be making an accommodation of sorts with the traditional elements of fiction that aren't really present in Plats, retaining a clear enough distance from mainstream literary fiction while making room for readers with the expectation that character creation and narrative (as well as setting) will be important features of a work of prose fiction, but Massive makes no such concessions to conventional reading habits and goes even farther than Plats in challenging the authority of these practices as the default mode of writing fiction. It is an audacious effort, to be sure, but if it has produced a work that is effectively unreadable for other than the most devoted enthusiasts of Trefry's kind of experimental text-building (few of whom are likely to read the entire book cover to cover, either), one could ask whether attempting to extend the underlying thematic and formal ideas on such a monumental scale serves those ideas most fruitfully. There are, of course, many long, dense novels that succeed through the "art of excess," but Trefry doesn't really seem to be trying to be "artful." Massive becomes massive through the invariable accretion of its textual shards. It grows, but doesn't develop.

However, this is the case only if you expect the text to develop in some perceptible way, either through linear narrative or some other suitable formal arrangement. Trefry deliberately frustrates the reader's expectation of some kind of orderly  progression, so perhaps a different sort of approach to such an intimidating text as this would result in a more satisfying experience with it. Perhaps my approach, a kind of unhurried browsing, is what is called for (ultimately I did not think I had failed to read the book carefully because the book doesn't want to be read with the usual sort of care). Or perhaps one could abandon altogether the notion that such a text can be read consecutively and instead choose passages and pages at random, or seek out passages that seem to have associative resonance, leaving the rest. One might repeat such a strategy as often as is necessary to comprehend how the text works, or, indeed, essentially repeat it endlessly. It seems pointless to ask whether either approach leads to a thorough enough reading of Massive, since a thorough reading hardly seems possible–even reading every word in the sequence in which they are presented would ultimately leave behind a maelstrom of verbal noise.

Of course, one could attempt to confront the edifice of words that is Massive through any of these means, but is any such effort more than an improvised expedient to negotiate this one particularly imposing, idiosyncratic work, to avoid being defeated by its apparent determination to remain unfathomable? Perhaps it does challenge us to be less complacent in our assumptions about what it means to "read" a work of fiction, although this is the challenge set by all truly innovative works of experimental fiction, and it might be said that Massive merely poses the challenge in an especially unequivocal way. Perhaps then Trefry wants to persuade us that genuinely "experimental" fiction pushes against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable practice in ways that might be confounding, that should be confounding. The question becomes whether what initially confounds can ultimately be more fully recognized, the boundaries reconfigured.

Not everything about Massive is difficult to assimilate. The typographical rearrangements are not really an innovation and could certainly be further adapted and extended as an aesthetically effective device. (Other novelists have done so.) What is unique to the novel is the way they have been allowed to fragment and divide its verbal substance into discursively incompatible pieces. An intrepid reader can develop strategies for sorting through these pieces, but while such dynamic reading provides a welcome challenge to the indolent reading habits encouraged by much literary fiction, the inclination to devote most of one's attention to a work as extreme in its call for such readerly fortitude as Massive must be restricted to a select few. Massive isn't quite just a curiosity, but it is hard to envisage a book that more resolutely tests the limits of creative incoherence without becoming altogether incoherent.

It might be tempting to dismiss a work like Massive as an experimental fiction so anarchic in spirit that it simply defies ordinary reading. Yet perhaps it might be most compelling as an effort to contest our ordinary conception of what it means to "read a book." If Massive can't really be read as a single unified experience, it may in fact be a book that can only be reread: after attempting Massive for the first time, by whatever method, we try it again, adopting a different method, but of course this will result, in effect, in reading a different version, even a different book. Who knows how many different books we could find in it. I'm not sure I find the subjects treated in Massive sufficiently engaging that would want to this, but it seems an intriguing conceit for an adventurous writer to pursue–many books in one. 

It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire "era" that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the "modern" assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all "experimental." In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term–Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.– and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream "literary fiction."

This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors–a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.

Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments–if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.

Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author's agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal's Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its "experimental" intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.

Segal's formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader's attention away from "prose" as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of "text" as something that exploits the material features "book" and "printed page." This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman's essay, "Surfiction–Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction," the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject "the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book" linearly and consecutively in favor of "innovations in the writing itself–in the typography and topology of [the] writing." These innovations should replace "grammatical syntax with 'paginal' syntax that grants to the reader a new "freedom" that will "give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning." 

Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls "surfiction"–which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick–it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman's own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their "texts" roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four "propositions." The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of "paginal syntax" was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other "illuminated" novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman's proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a "choice in the ordering of the discourse."

The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: "There is no 'correct' order of reading," we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that "treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read." The reader's discovery of the work's "topology," to again invoke Federman, finds the "space" of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the "content" the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.

The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader's concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly  unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader's attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.

Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel's structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal's ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the "freedom" granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of "saying something." Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn't quite venture that far.

Something similar could be said of Honeysett's Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction–as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named "character" who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author's identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author's life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.

But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn't attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative–but it couldn't, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim–but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.

The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the  reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction's emphasis on the author's life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still  labeled "fiction." It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form. 

I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn't really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer's perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist's concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.

As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what "experimental" might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.

In addition to The Reading Experience, I have also been producing a Substack publication,  Unbeaten Paths, that usually consists of multiple book reviews of “adventurous fiction” and appears every 2-3 months. Until now I have retained both of these publications as complementary endeavors, largely because the blog has been around for a long time (20 years) and still attracts some visitors, so I have been reluctant to give it up.

I have considered converting the blog to a Substack newsletter (it covers a wider range of literary subjects, whereas the newsletter form accommodates motley book reviews somewhat awkwardly and so far has garnered a limited audience). I am hesitant to do so because, again, of the blog’s longevity and because I still also think the blog form has value. On the other hand, I would like to see if I could get a broader audience than currently on Substack.

The present owner of Twitter has basically ruined it as a means to steer people to external publications (not just Substack), another reason to move wholly to the newsletter format. I may indeed convert TRE to newsletter form, while keeping the blog and continuing to post here as well. I may go over completely to newsletter. Things could stay the same, but this is the choice that likely produces maximum frustration. The decline of blogs, the growing degradation of social media as a method of engagement, and the uncertainty that still obtains with a medium such as Substack, as well as the drying-up of outside online and print venues open to reviews and literary criticism (at least for me) have seemingly converged to make the prospects for the kind of criticism I write wobbly indeed.

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.