THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL was for most of the previous century a golden icon, an aspirational myth of grand and glittering proportions. Though he never attained that grail, Seymour Krim, an ardent worshipper at its altar, perhaps best articulated the dream in a 1968 essay in which he described the hopes of fellow aspirants to “use the total freedom of our imaginations to rearrange the shipwrecked facts of our American experience into their ultimate spiritual payoff.” 

NOT TO MAKE THIS review about me or anything, but about ten years ago I published a big book with multiple characters and story lines. My dad, then in his seventies, said I should have included a character list and roadmap because he had trouble following it all. I remember thinking, in response, that he’d obviously gotten old and slow and that his tastes were conservative and fuddy duddy. Today, I’m willing to concede I might have turned into this same fuddy-duddy, which I offer up as context for my thoughts on Ed Park’s—what is the right adjective here? discursive? fascinating?

I HAVE FREQUENTLY BEEN SEATED in the dark near those who have variously been called “the pilly-sweater crowd,” “cinemaniacs,” or “Titus-heads” (referring to the two main movie theaters at MoMA). They are pejorative terms for a certain type of New York City cinephile, one whose zeal for the seventh art seems to have been leached of all pleasure and has instead transmogrified into grim compulsion. Demographically, they are often (but not always) white, male, and middle-aged or older.

WHEN A NOVELIST’S sophomore novel is narrated by a novelist bemoaning the New York Times review of her first novel, even the most auto-skeptical critic might be forgiven for pulling up a search window. Turns out that the Times review of Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation (2018) is nothing like the “cancellation” her character, Anna, undergoes in The Book of Ayn. However, the review does begin by declaring that “Satire is a difficult genre to neatly define,” followed immediately by a definition that is roughly what you’d get by googling “satire definition.” You can hardly blame Freiman if reading these words in

THE CRITIC Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a work of biographical criticism with strong views on the genre’s pitfalls and limitations. Right at the outset, he pronounces “the absolute impossibility of summing up” his subject, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and promises that this auteur monograph will not stoop to “plot outline and capsule description.” He questions the very point of “biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks.” And he bemoans the “dulling effect of canonization,” citing as a negative model Sartre’s biography

I WAS SEVENTEEN AND IN MY THIRD YEAR OF FRENCH when I learned the phrase la petite mort: “the little death.” The boy in class I had a crush on—what was it he called himself? Roland, Jean-Pierre, Henri?—informed me, whispering so Madame Chrétien wouldn’t overhear us, that it was meant to describe an orgasm, or rather (I discovered later, after experiencing more than the panicked fumbling of high school trysts), the untenanted feeling that comes after having had one. Of course, I thought, of course, great sex would be something like an annihilation of the self. In my diary, I

LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that

IT WAS THE FALL of the Berlin Wall that prompted Jenny Erpenbeck to become a writer, as if the beliefs and structures guiding her life that had, almost overnight, been rendered obsolete, could be recuperated by language. But Erpenbeck, born steps from the Wall in 1967, wasn’t interested in memoir or commemoration. She preferred tricks of self-effacement, recursion, deferral, anything that lent “freedom from the compulsion of realism.” Her debut, The Old Child (1999), is a parable of a loser’s triumph: a young woman posing as a fourteen-year-old goes to live in a children’s home, turning life into a game