Human, All Too Inhuman | The New Republic
newrepublic.com · 5,411 words · saved by 2 readers
The legendary castigation of big, bouncy novels that lack humanity.
A genre is hardening. It is becoming easy to describe the contemporary idea of the “big, ambitious novel.” Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: he is Dickens. Such recent novels as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Mason & Dixon, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and now White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. A landscape is disclosed—lively and varied and brightly marked, but riven by dead gullies. WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been…
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