8 - Experiment and the Genre Novel

Summary

In a widely cited 2008 review entitled ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, Zadie Smith tackled the perennial question of the death of the Anglophone novel as a viable literary form for articulating contemporary experience. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), Smith wrote, represent divergent trajectories for novelistic style in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, O’Neill’s complacent lyrical realism in the tradition of Balzac and Flaubert perpetuates the foundational myth that ‘the self is a bottomless pool’ and wields this anachronism into a new era of ontological and technological entanglement. On the other, McCarthy’s deconstructive ‘anti-novel’ unceremoniously dismantles bourgeois depth psychology to reveal the chaos beneath – that indivisible remainder, which cannot be processed or made to cohere. Smith’s critique draws sustenance from the opposition in theories of the novel between realism and experimentation: a dichotomy that, as Dominic Head notes, has unhelpfully persisted in British literary criticism. The drawing-up of boundaries in the post-war period between writers like Kingsley Amis and Margaret Drabble on the side of realism, and figures such as B. S. Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose on the side of experimentation, has thus simplified novelistic practices that might more productively be read as occupying some messy middle ground.