Mark Sussman
We live in “the Bad Timeline.” It’s a trope you see surface occasionally on social media, especially after some cartoonishly awful thing happens. The idea is this: At some point before Trump was elected or before 9/11 or before Vietnam (pick your generational trauma), reality cleaved in two. In one reality, the Bad Thing was averted. In ours, the Bad Thing happened. 
For a writer convinced that originality is a myth, Tom McCarthy publishes new work with impressive regularity. The essays in Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish were written between 2002 and 2016 and began life as magazine pieces, reviews, introductions, and lectures. In that time, McCarthy also published four novels (Men in Space, Remainder, C, and Satin Island) and the book-length study Tin-Tin and the Secret of Literature. The essays in this collection mostly continue that book’s concern with two interrelated sets of texts: avant-garde literature and French theory. This makes McCarthy something of an outlier, even among other avant-garde novelists (if that 
Avant-garde writers tend to think that their work is unpopular because it is difficult. I tend to think there is another reason: most avant gardists sound like total jerks. They’re always telling you the things you like are bad and old, and that in order to remain relevant you need to like the new, innovative thing they’re doing. If you enjoy reading a realist novel with an engaging plot, character development, and sharp dialogue, you must be stuck in the nineteenth century. If you like imagery in your poetry, you are basically a fascist. To deny this is to demonstrate 
In the middle of his discussion of an episode of Oprah’s Book Club, Timothy Aubry pauses to wonder, “Why is the expression ‘I don’t get it’ so characteristic of the insecure middlebrow reader?” In a sense, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Readers is his book-length answer to that question. In a strange way, though, Aubry’s question reflects back on itself; we might well ask what it is about the middlebrow reader that’s been, historically, so worrisome to intellectuals. The term middlebrow itself is, for cultural luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Leslie Fiedler, a term of abuse,