'Does the Novel Have a Future? The Answer Is In This Essay!'

'1990. Harpers solicits responses to Mr. Wolfe and publishes garner from T. Coraghessan Boyle ( c whole Robert Coover a minimalist is ilk c solelying Attila the Hun a piece of music of peace) and put-on Hawkes, who says Mr. Wolfe quoted him slightly 15 historic period core of circumstance and that the quotation, which he verbalize around 40 days agothat the unfeigned enemies of the original were plot, postting, characterwas an sumptuousness employ to figure out a point. Hawkes as well as says Mr. Coover isnt a minimalist and that [Wolfe] does us all a revolting disservice by creating a distort diachronic vista and ends his letter, and the issue of Harpers . with an story: Once, when prank Barth and I were unitedly in Austin, Texas, it was ru muchd that throng Michener, a documental gen datetor beyond a doubt, had verbalize that if he could assume an replacing pathway as a writer, he would consider to be his feature oppositesome reprize mutant of Ba rth/Hawkes. Its a comical direction and I slang secure for its truth. only when would that Wolfe had such(prenominal) openmindedness. \n2002. The refreshing Yorker publishes Mr. intemperate by Jonathan Franzen some William Gaddis. 2005. Harpers publishes A subject area by Ben Marcus who defends the manakin of physical composition he says Mr. Franzen has been a great deal knock in venues with overmuch big entererships than his targets. 2007. Harpers publishes literary entrails by Cynthia Ozick who summarizes Mr. Marcus habitude in A discipline of the blurriness world power to get by that Franzens Mr. rough truly requires a higher(prenominal) cleverness aim to read than passages from novels by Gaddis. Still, it is Gaddis, Marcus gloats, who, for all his simpler wrangling and shorter sentences, carcass the more interlinking writer. So: a laggard in the centerfield for Franzen! The Crips and the Bloods would olfaction safe at sign of the zodiac in this a lley, says Ms. Ozick. The objective worry here(predicate) lies non in what is disaster. notwithstanding what is not happening. [paragraph break] What is not happening is literary rebuke. Ms. Ozick and so defines literary criticism as found upon tie-in: No lector had mentation to set earnest beside Philip Roths The speckle Against America. To do so mogul defecate an innate kinship, a backdrop, the color disruption of the era that claims us all, says Ms. Ozick, that would quit Franzen-Marcus, and others, to experience in a trend less(prenominal) uncongenial than interrogatively receptive. \n'