![]() ![]() The public, argued this serious young American writer, pushing his owlish spectacles up his nose, had been short-changed - neglected! alienated! - by the flatulent windbaggery of the late-20th-century metafabulists: Barth, Gaddis, Pynchon, all that mob, and even the serious young American writer’s hero, Don DeLillo, to whom he had once been in thrall. From the fissure between the hifalutin literary world, with its noodly experiments in form and structure, and the humble book shopper, with her preference - so basic! - for old-fangled nonsense-like narrative and character development. A saviour from what? From the baroque perversions of postmodernism. ![]() ![]() Twenty-five years ago, a young American writer, very serious indeed, author of two precocious novels admired by critics but ignored by the so-called general reader (who is this shadowy figure?) announced, in an essay for Harper’s magazine, that his national literature was in need of a saviour. ![]()
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