Has there been a truly "essential" novel since Infinite Jest?

[MTA]

I mean, sometimes I hear 2666 mentioned as being fairly groundbreaking, but I've yet to read it. I just feel like there hasn't been a novel since Infinite Jest was released in 1996 that has been lauded by critics as much as Wallace's magnum opus, while still innovating/doing things in a rather eccentric way.

[Babbalanja]

I highly recommend 2666. It's a gripping, multifaceted read. However, for all his talent describing the black hole of man's inhumanity to man, Bolaño certainly wasn't the wordsmith that Wallace was.

And even though I love the book (and all of Wallace's work), I'm not even sure how "essential" Infinite Jest was. Instead of writing a novel that readers would actually read, Wallace indulged himself and created a phenomenon: one of those big novels that no one reads.

Jest is essential reading for tried-and-true Wallace fans, but I can't blame casual readers for losing patience with a nearly-thousand-page work with a hundred pages of endnotes. Wallace's stories get a lot of their humor from the way they sink under the weight of their self-consciousness and grind to a halt: this is much more effective in the vignettes in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men than stretched out over nine hundred pages in Jest. If some responsible editor had persuaded the author to curtail his show-off tendencies, maybe people would approach the work with curiosity rather than trepidation.

Regards,

Istvan

[Lokasenna]

How does one define essential? The devil in me is suggesting that there hasn't been a truly 'essential' novel since 1984.

[Desolation]

How does one define essential? The devil in me is suggesting that there hasn't been a truly 'essential' novel since 1984.
1984's a bit of a stretch if you ask me...I'd set it a few decades later at Gravity's Rainbow.

[MrRegular]

How does one define essential? The devil in me is suggesting that there hasn't been a truly 'essential' novel since 1984.
I quite agree that we need to be more precise about what we mean by 'essential', because I would agrue that the most essential books I own are Webster's Dictionary, The Yellow Pages and the Book of Mormon which I use for the essential function of keeping my uneven kitchen table from wobbling.

[Brad Coelho]

Well from a critical praise & raw girth perpsective, Underworld followed suit a year later. While far from Wallace's eccentricity (a la the previously recommended Gravity's Rainbow), it has similar size, scope, ambition & singularity in style.

[Jozanny]

MTA: Perhaps, what you are asking, in another way, is whether or not postmodernism justifies itself as a distinct literary movement; my cautious answer, at least since John Gardner, is yes, with the caveat being one's sensibilities can be abused--not by Gardner, who is too much of a moralist to overwhelm, but Wallace, Mitchell, and maybe DeLillo, threaten the reader with too much technique.

However, this said, Cloud Atlas is a very powerful experience, and though Mitchell integrates it with earlier works, it can stand to be read on its own. Difficult? Yes, but I do not think it despairs of humanity entirely.

[MTA]

MTA: Perhaps, what you are asking, in another way, is whether or not postmodernism justifies itself as a distinct literary movement; my cautious answer, at least since John Gardner, is yes, with the caveat being one's sensibilities can be abused--not by Gardner, who is too much of a moralist to overwhelm, but Wallace, Mitchell, and maybe DeLillo, threaten the reader with too much technique.

However, this said, Cloud Atlas is a very powerful experience, and though Mitchell integrates it with earlier works, it can stand to be read on its own. Difficult? Yes, but I do not think it despairs of humanity entirely.



I believe postmodernism has already justified itself as a distinct literary movement, if nothing else but for its technical elements. What I am more curious about is whether or not the movement is dead, and if so, have there been any novels released in the past 20 years that could be labeled as the forefathers of an emerging style?

[Jozanny]

Mitchell's novel is the most distinctive that I know of, although I have to caution I have not yet read Ghostwritten or anything else. I am afraid to be disappointed and equally not ready yet to take him on again, as I have my own flagging career track to worry about.

I don't think postmodernism is dead, as it has been a distinct movement even before modernism itself had a name. I am too comfortably parked right at the moment to go get my kindle to give you a list of titles that followed in the tradition of Sterne's Shandy before the modern era, but the tradition of self-reference/textual irony and disruption have been around a long time, and one sees a glimmer of it even in Rabelais, who I am finding a difficult read, btw.

What I will say is that I think Mitchell's experiments represent a paradigm shift of a kind.

On one side you have Gaddis, Pychon, and then Gardner kind of paying it forward, with DeLillo and Mitchell and Wallace making rather extraordinary demands, although I will chance to say Mitchell makes the most. I am not forgetting Calvino, but it is difficult to put everyone together on the family tree in terms of influences and commonalities.

I am not big on Pychon as a matter of personal taste, but GR does have very significant passages.

[sixsmith]

MTA, I’m going to disregard your use of the term essential and assume that you are asking whether since 1996, there has been a novel as a) innovative and b) as critically lauded as Infinite Jest. I think Istvan hints at the problem(s) inherent in the question. That novel was greeted with a wave of cloying approbation yet as Wallace himself pointed out, it was apparent that many reviewers had not, indeed could not have possibly, read the work from cover to cover. I suspect this kind of thing happens frequently. Word begins to spread about a novel. It gets hailed as 'groundbreaking' or 'culturally significant' and suddenly you're staring at a blow to your cultural capital if you don't nail it down. A novel as large, as nominally 'experimental' and as frequently well written as Wallace's was never going to get under the radar for too long. So to the extent that one pays attention to critics, the reception attending Infinite Jest needs to be taken with particularly large serving of salt.

It's been a little while since I read Infinite Jest, but I'd suggest that a novel like Cloud Atlas, while essentially a re-working of Calvino's genius, is more innovative than Wallace's tome, which, in my opinion, is mostly remarkable for Wallace's knowledge and use of the English language (of course, that may of itself constitute innovation but I don't think Wallace is really breaking any virgin ground - he's just a freak). There was a small amount of critical tut-tutting directed toward Mitchell's ventriloquism and narrative acrobatics but personally I find his work very accessible (perhaps I diverge from you in this regard Joz). All of his novels have, on the whole, been greeted with considerable praise in the UK and Australia. More to the point, they are all brilliant.

In parting, and echoing what Brad has said, I’d wager that Underworld, for all its considerable flaws, is among the great postmodern novels and is perhaps, in a different way, more ambitious than Infinite Jest. It’s certainly a more difficult read and I think of the three novelists, DeLillo is the one most likely to, as Joz puts it, threaten (or stultify) the reader with technique.

[sixsmith]

Sorry MTA. I managed to post without reading your and Jozanny's respective follow up posts. In answer to the modified question, I must say no (or not in my reading experience). I'm not sure that Mitchell's genre contortions are outlandish enough to constitute a paradigm shift. However, it must be said that his fiction leaves one with the distinct impression that anything is possible.

[Jozanny]

This is the second Wallace thread I have participated in without having read his signature work, which I suspect makes me something of a dilettante, but the read I picked the Oblivion text first over the longer *too jokey* novel, is that a reviewer said Oblivion deals with suicide, and Wallace's death has become a psychological white whale for me. As with the issues surrounding ontology, I want to know why Wallace joined in with his character, although it may be impossible for me to ever fully understand his check out.

I cannot even accuse him of not knowing about people like me and disabled identity; he did know it and use it and as I understand, it forms an important subplot in IJ--but I too, MTA, remain curious about your use of essential, as first reactions usually mean something.

Istvan may be correct about the conflated critical arc, as I do intend to read Jest but not now and I am not sure when I will want at it, but I am curious about your descriptor in terms of defining movement authors, i.e., Calvino, as I am not exactly sure Wallace is actually groundbreaking--is that what you mean, and why do you think so?

11 p.m. add on: His style is certainly distinctively his own, but I am not sure that is much different than DeLillo's multi-plex paranoia.

In terms of any contemporary and/or late 20th century post-modern conceits touching on the essential, I'd give that award to John Gardner, and then maybe Mitchell, except that Mitchell is too current to rate what his future impact will amount to.

[_Shannon_]

If I could--I would make everyone read Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo, Mr. Ives' Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos....and the very awesome literary non-fiction works- Home Town by Tracey Kidder and Generation Kill by Evan Wright.

I struggle to find contemporary literature worth reading, but these books are books I think any thinking person ought to read.

[Jozanny]

Shannon, no disrepect intended, but that has nothing to do with Wallace and his impact on postmodernism; I still read contemporary social manners novels and have enjoyed Russo, though what he emphasizes can occasionally come off as tacky, but I'd like to hear more on how the OP rates IJ and why in relation to the discussion.

[_Shannon_]

The thread is entitled "Has there been a truly "essential" novel since IJ?"

Sorry to proffer my opinion about that idea without being thoroughly pretentious--