In Search of the Modern(ist)

Belief in the Novel as Form

D. W. White

Critical Essay

Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal.

—Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”

This essay was first presented at the 2026 American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, and then published in a slightly altered, serialized form in our sister press’ Substack. Below is the full version with footnotes and references.

This paper is emergent from an upcoming graduate course I’ll be teaching this fall, one that I hope engenders lively discussion about the form of the novel, as an idea, technology, or even belief. This class will be taught in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University, here in Chicago, and as such I’m designing it to reach students as creative writers—that is to say, considering the novel form as artists working in that same (or similar) medium. Of course it is also a seminar, meaning that an important goal of the course is to introduce students to literature they may or may not know, and equip them to think deeply and originally about it. This paper, then, is my early attempt at investigating these questions, in the hope of uncovering areas of rewarding exploration for our autumnal adventures to come.

Broadly, I’m interested in considering the legacy of literary modernism in the twenty-first century through a narrative-focused, text-centric framework. The title of my class this fall is (The Problem of Form in) The Long 20th Century Novel, by which I mean the novel more-or-less after Dickens, and occurring on either side of the Atlantic; for our conference today, I’ve kept my focus on contemporary American work, principally Lucy Ives’ Life Is Everywhere. I plan to encourage my students in tracing an evolving—and, crucially, ongoing—project of avant-garde poetics that sees a continuum from the High Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s through an investment in novelistic form into the present day.

Several questions will animate the course, and will happily serve as introduction to this paper: How has the novel, as both technique and technology, continued to investigate and discover new formal boundaries for itself? What do we mean by “form” when talking about the novel generally, and how does it relate to other things we might wonder about a particular novel? Can we find a formal/stylistic lineage from High Modernist writers in the early 20th century through certain risk-adept novelists in the early 21st? Might we configure “Modernism” or “the Modernist ethos” as a commitment to innovation in form, rather than the standalone presence of such innovation, thereby freeing it from traditional temporal constraints while retaining its distinctiveness as a movement (and even belief)? Can this definition help us to balance proliferating taxonomies in criticism against threadbare mannerism in the marketplace? How can MFA students fit these ideas and queries into our own writing practice, and what might it mean to shape the novels we write around the problem of form?

In short, the focus of the class is on the question of form in the novel during the “long twentieth century,” a term borrowed from the field of history, signifying the wider forces at play in shaping society and geopolitics from the 1870s to the 2010s. With this in mind, we’ll set out to encounter the novel as an art form spanning a period from after Dickens to the present day, often but non-exclusively through the prism of Modernism, that enfant terrible of literary thought. Here I’d like to sketch a type of beginning to that search.

I. The Votive

The central question I’d like to ask is: how and why has the novel evolved (and evolved in this way) in the post-Dickensian era? I take into that inquiry a conviction in Modernism—somewhat alternatively conceived, perhaps, than might be typical—as the most important, surely most interesting, occurrence to happen to the novel since its formation. A great deal has been said about this topic already, of course; it seems lately that Modernism is rather less dead than it used to be. As a creative writer who teaches MFAs and who’s just this month finished his PhD from the UIC Program for Writers, I’m interested in Modernism less as a historical subject—and even less than less as a “theoretical site”—than as an understanding of artistic practice, as a rallying point for certain novelistic techniques and their associated rationale. In other words, as praxis: an organizing system of beliefs about what the novel (form) is, could, and should be; something of a cosmic background that a writer develops to guide their approach to their work. This is the framework through which I view my inciting question, and the responses I hope to navigate alongside my graduate students this fall, all of whom are emerging writers beginning to orient themselves towards the world as artists.

The first problem that one encounters in attempting to think of the relationship Modernism has to contemporary literature is that many people feel it no longer exists. I’m going to largely elude discussions about New Modernism (or Neomodernism), except to lean on a quick definition from the critic Jonathan Russell Clark, writing in LitHub, who offers the following: “This is the New Modernism: locating humanity, truth, and revelation in everything. As artists, they leave no emotional stone unturned. Because all fiction is artifice, the New Modernists see that even artifice can house meaning and beauty.” ¹Clark’s essay, an extended review of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, is sharp and compelling; its being written in a popular forum deepens rather than vitiates the relevance to this paper, in that we’re interested here in the novel as a belief, not a taxonomical argument, and belief exists only among the believers. LitHub offers as good a reflection as anywhere of (some of) the prevailing understandings of contemporary literature by readers and writers.

The argument, then, for a New Modernism is one that sees some current novels as inheriting the maximalist expanse of the postmodern systems novel—David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Johnathan Franzen, Zadie Smith—while “reclaiming” the type of lived-in emotional resonance that the Modernism of the 1920s and 30s embraced (themselves retaining that from the Victorian novel, along with little else). So where Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner (each alluded to by Clark) developed complex, multifaceted characters with rich inner lives—“round” in E. M. Forsterer’s term—the endless plurality and deliberate, frenetic, over-engineering of hysterical realism in the last few decades of the twentieth century, toiling under the glare of poststructuralism, sacrificed real (fictive) people at the altar of the inexhaustible meta. Alright then.

I find this compelling, and I largely agree with Clark’s point when he mentions writers such as Kleeman, Karen Russell, and Ben Lerner, among others. I find two quibbles, by which declension will lead us into our main discussion. The first (and more minor) is the idea that postmodern novelists were largely uninterested in realizing emotional depth in their work, which seems a difficult assertion to make in the face of, say, the passage where C overdoses on laced heroin in Infinite Jest, itself surely the ne plus ultra of the postmodern systems novel.² Reading that scene, it’s hard, and probably impossible, to make the case that Wallace doesn’t have the felicity or investment in building out real characters with compelling inner lives. This doesn’t really contradict Clark’s point—he argues that postmodern novelists, while not being “sentimental” nonetheless might have such moments in their books—so much as it reminds us that some novelists are better than others, and someone like David Foster Wallace or Lucy Ives might be able to express the sentiment along with the intellect, while others cannot. To borrow from the subtitle of Clark’s essay,³ I’d argue that some novelists can manage being both “deeply felt and experimental” more deftly than others. The point is that emotional resonance has never really left the novel, and while it may flirt with flamboyant abeyance, it remains in most ways the engine of fiction.

My second, and larger, quibble with the concept of New Modernism is not about (connections to) post- but rather neo-modernism. The contention that the contemporary novel on the whole is “experimental,” in any recognizable sense of the term, strikes me as generous as best, and rather mad at worst. This is especially true in the United States, and amongst major publishers.⁴ What’s taken for experimental writing—when used as a compliment⁵—is frequently translatable as “a strange and attention-grabbing plot that interweaves one or more topical socio-cultural issues from an expected angle, written in accessible prose that takes occasional and modest adventures into techniques such as embedded text messages or run-on sentences.” While the language may often be sharp, intelligent, funny, and disarming, it’s very rarely difficult, and nearly never engages in the type of formal play and innovation that, for example, Woolf or Joyce sought.

This is not to say that current mainstream American fiction has no good books on offer—milage will vary for each to each; some I personally find quite strong—nor is it to say that difficult writing is to be seen as some sacral endgame in its own right; because it’s not, and never has been (not seriously). However, the streamlined plots and smooth prose of most contemporary writing is, at best, a sort of prima facie experimentalism that looks to serve the reader rather than challenge them.⁶ These novels often cultivate (or have ascribed to them) a certain mystique, a sense of strangeness generated from increasingly-routine literary devices—unnamed narrators and protagonists, fragmented structures broken into short chapters, vague-yet-specific settings, omitted quotation marks, the generally-nonsensical first-person present—that stand in for (are widely accepted as) the type of deep, committed risk-taking in form and style that permeate not only celebrated literature of the early twentieth century but also powerful, yet lesser known, fiction currently being put out by small presses. And that’s on the more experimental end of the mainstream novel; most literary fiction released by corporate publishing (the “big four”) doesn’t have, or want, anything to do with the term “avant-garde.”⁷ What I’m suggesting is that the type of work increasingly called New Modernism lacks severely any Modernism in it at all; it is formally anemic and fails to understand the foundational belief of the High Modernism that stands as its supposed forbearer: a refusal of artistic convention for the sake of artistic expression.

All that said, I do find there to be something like a “new Modernism” happening, one that I (at the risk of indulging in over-taxonomicality) would simply call Modernism, and ask that we rethink what that term might mean. This is also where the utility of “High Modernism” comes to the fore, as a convenient and more natural way of demarcating Mrs Woolf and friends from the current writers I’m going to insist we (the royal we at least, here in the formidable redoubt of our essay) also label Modernist.

Ultimately I’d like to suggest that by defining Modernism as the avant-garde realized as a “formal commitment to form,” we might be better equipped to reckon with Modernism’s expansive shadow while identifying the new newness being done with the novel-as-form in the contemporary world. On this account, Modernism is at once more narrow and more broad than typically understood; more exacting in what qualifies as a challenge to convention, yet more open in who (and when) are able to mount an offensive. To make my case, I’d like to look at the work of some contemporary American novelists who, I argue, are doing the “New Modernist thing” such that we might excise that superfluous prefix and celebrate literary inherence in the way that novelists themselves tend to conceive of it.

II. L’Œuevre

First let’s modify that fresh definition of High Modernism I suggested a couple of paragraphs back: an (internal)refusal of artistic convention for the sake of (external)artistic expression. By this revision I aim to spotlight an essential facet of Modernism in the early part of the previous century; the fact that its unease with the status quo in the given artistic medium—and, thereby, its attempts at doing something else—originates from within that status quo, as internal to the convention. What exactly does this mean, and why does it matter?

For the High Modernists, the work they sought to do in the form of the novel, story, or poem was indelibly linked with the Victorian literature against which they rebelled; their revolution depended, like all revolutions, upon the status quo antebellum. In Tradition and the Individual Talent T. S. Eliot argues that a poet must posses, indeed cultivate, a “historical sense [which] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”…one that “makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”⁸ From within this knowledge of “tradition,” then, the poet can do something new, and “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” This leads him to a marvelous formulation of the way art exists in relation to time:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

We might think of this as a formulation of “literary ancestry,” a term I have introduced to my graduate students in other courses, something essential to thinking of oneself as an artist, a writer. As Eliot points out, a new artwork inevitably engages with that which has come before it even while emerging as its own thing, a sui generis art-object that reaches back to that tradition and grasps it. The essential element for our purposes is that what becomes the challenge to artistic convention emerges, again, from within that very convention; it displays and even celebrates a deep comprehension of the modes and styles that came before it, while simultaneously asserting that those methods are not our methods, not now.

Woolf’s liquid entanglement of the aesthetic with the ontological in Modern Fiction recognizes something similar when she asks, “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” Her point in that essay is that the technology of the novel has become outmoded; the liturgy no longer fits with the belief: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (287). There’s a distinction to be found in this passage of Modern Fiction between, we might say, fiction that is “realist” and that which is “life-like,” which for Woolf hinges more on less on the rendering of consciousness and the inner lives of characters.⁹ In this essay and others (especially Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown) can trace, however, a similarly robust commitment in Woolf to an appreciation of and engagement with the literature that came before her as found in Eliot’s essay. We can see, in other words, that Modernism originally positioned itself as a movement seriously invested in the art that came before it—and, it’s not hard to suggest, after.

So why does this matter for us, and our attempt to understand the form of the novel in the current day? Besides recognizing an engagement with the temporal scope of literary tradition that has always been baked into Modernism—and which, therefore, offers a configuration of the movement, or term, that is best understood not as temporally locked into a strictly delimited area—a focus on internal challenges to artistic convention equips us with a more pliable hermeneutic in our attempts to locate certain contemporary novelists in relation to both their peers and the High Modernists glossed above. Are writers such as Lucy Ives, Lucy Corin, and Emily Hall best understood in a grouping with others (something that a “New Modernism” framework would maintain), or can we see something else happening, a trend distinct from most 21st century fiction, one that elaborates an animating continuum in the novel form?¹⁰

Earlier I said I’d like to conceive of Modernism as the avant-garde realized as a “formal commitment to form,” which is dangerously near becoming tautological affection unless we step down on it some. As will hopefully become clear, my troubles stem from the fact that I find a specific group of novelists to be doing something legitimately avant-garde in a manner not found in most contemporary fiction, such that (I argue) their work is more appropriately understood as Modernist in their retaining an investment in form that mainstream publishing, by and large, has rejected.¹¹

The most well-known novelist whom I’d place in this avant-garde camp is Lucy Ives, who is perhaps on the border of the mainstream, and to the extent that she is, represents a nice exception to prove our rule. She recently won a Guggenheim—which isn’t necessary an indication of being “mainstream” but does illustrate her increasing prominence—and the arc of her career illustrates something about how publishing works in this country, in that her novels have become progressively more avant-garde (“weaker” in her terminology), something she’s been able to get away with, so to speak, as she’s found success.¹² Her most recent novel, Life is Everywhere, is perhaps the most effective¹³ example of what I mean by “formal commitment to form” in defining the avant-garde and, thereby, Modernism. For context, let’s borrow Ives’ definition of a “weak novel” from her essay of the same name:

It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all. This is, I want to show, an important quality for a literary work to have—the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre. This effort, rather than being destined for failure, is in fact fundamental for the flourishing of the novel form.¹⁴

In other words, a weak novel is an unconventional one, the type often called “experimental,” in ways that are foundational to its understanding of itself, qua novel. This last point is the one I’d like to run with; Ives’ expression—that the weak novel “reflects on its own status as a novel”—fits what I want to say about my affective tautology.

Life is Everywhere is a reckless novel, in that it seems to be careening from idea to idea, beginning with a 10-odd page rundown of the history of botulism before we meet anything like a character. Even there, though, and throughout there is a focus, an artistic vision being realized, one that comes in via the voice—the idiomatic narration which grounds the novel even as it, at times, elides the reader’s full comprehension of its scope. A commitment to formal innovation appears in Ives’ novel as the conviction with which she leans on various, and new, narrational techniques to do something in her book, to accelerate whatever claims it wishes to make about the world—or, more broadly, render the type of fictive world it wishes to realize—such that, simply, the form emerges as content. What I mean is, certain novelists approach The Novel first as an art form, then as a vessel for whatever socio-cultural or discursive sequence that might be of interest. That is to say (as we say in workshop), the style in a sense comes before the story.¹⁵

Now, this does not mean that Life is Everywhere is “all style and no substance,” or that there is no plot, or anything like that. There is in fact quite a bit of plot, giving it a systems-novel legacy. Erin Adamo is a deeply stressed grad student in Manhattan, locked out of her apartment with only her bag, which contains a few manuscripts and other errata, and proceeds to become the star of the show: we move through the contents of her bag as Ives reproduces Erin’s own novella, her novel, and her advisor’s monograph before the night is through.¹⁶ So we have plot, or narrative¹⁷—fictive events—in fact quite a lot of them. But in Life is Everywhere it is form that serves as the engine for the novel qua art-object; qua novel. Ives seems to be interested in working out an idea for what the novel could do, in the sense of its artistic properties and parameters, much more so than she is interested in telling the tale of Erin-the-Grad-Student. (If the opposite were the case, she’d just tell us the story, straight up). It is a book which jealously guards its medium.

Here’s the rub: this, it seems to me, is why novels exist. Of course there is a necessary discursive (as narrative) component to novels, because they are constructed of a medium that can only (cogently) operate as, well, discourse: language communicates something from one person to another person (or maybe a dog). But literary fiction novels are not solely, or even primarily, vehicles of discourse; they are art-objects. We know this is true because if they were meant mainly to communicate, they’d be much better at it. We further know this because there are other, far more efficient, entities in the world that are also made up of language which do communicate quite well: journalism, reportage, directions on the street from a friendly stranger, restaurant menus, an email from your boss, the weather app on your phone, instructions from a pharmacist or a doctor, traffic signs, opening and closing times on a shop window, didactic placards in an art museum, notes you take down during a meeting to remember what was said.¹⁸ All of these, and many more, are instances of language, as cohered into an object, meant to communicate something directly, precisely, and simply. None of these things are art, which is what a novel is, which is not about communication but is instead about expression.

This distinction has been deeply, and wildly, misplaced in mainstream literary publishing, which is interested in two things: how well a book will sell, and how well a book communicates a feel-good message, which in turn means how well it will sell. It is not difficult to see why novels that are interested in themselves as procedures of artistic discovery, then, are largely rejected by corporate publishing. It is a rare writer who can break through that streaked and thumb-printed lid of glass, and the ones that do virtually always have sufficient name recognition (be it because of prior work or some other reason) to ensure their books will, nonetheless, sell.¹⁹ However, many people—those who work for these publishing houses and others, such as commentators and critics—are invested in seeing mainstream fiction as “experimental,” a concept which has retained its credibility and caché from the days of the Salon des Refusés and all that followed, from Impressionism on down.

Hence, in my read, arguments for things such as “New Modernism,” which feels to be born from an anxiety to locate some sort of worthwhile artistic innovation in a sea of fiction that is diametrically opposed to it. Ironically, we don’t need to make any such prefixes. We simply need to start reading the books that are sustaining the avant-garde right now; we need only to stick with the Modernism that has never left us. To bring us back to our main point, a formal commitment to form—crafting novels that employ form as an end to itself, that see themselves as novelistic art-objects via the prism of form—is both inherently incompatible with the chief concerns of mainstream American publishing and is an animating, invigorating impulse found in 1920’s High Modernism as much as in, say, Life is Everywhere.

III. The Bag

What Ives gets so correct her novel is that artistic vision mentioned earlier. This, I am coming to think, is the most important thing for an artist to possess; maybe we can call it spirit. I’d like to indulge in an anecdote for a moment. Recently, at one of the presses where I work, our prose team was discussing a manuscript submission, one that tried something very radical in structure and technique, and didn’t quite manage to pull it off, despite our interest in the idea. The team was attempting to figure out what exactly wasn’t working, and I mentioned the example of Life is Everywhere, of which the manuscript (very broadly) reminded. Why does one succeed and one not, even through they are both roughly equivalent in “how experimental” they are? I think the answer might be this idea of vision, of the completeness with which an artist first sees and can then realize, her art-object.

Of course this has a lot to do with talent, and other ephemera of life’s vagaries. But reading Life is Everywhere one gets the sense that, despite the wildness and the weakness, there is purpose to the novel: the person writing knows what she’s doing. Even, and especially, if we can’t see it for long stretches of page.

Erin’s mother was turning now to the dietary preferences of Ben’s family. She wanted to articulate just what it was they didn’t eat. She wanted to be exact, sociological.

Erin’s father did not like this. It was not just that he abhorred lists, parataxis, any scenario in which items gathered, free from hierarchy; he was not invited to this topic and therefore he did not matter.

Now Erin’s father said, “Erin doesn’t know anything about what they eat.”

“Yes, she does,” said Erin’s mother.

Below the table, the tortoiseshell cat wound itself around legs and feet. Erin thought, the mouth of a cat is used for cleaning, eat-ing, breathing, yawning, self-defense, abstract vocalizations. Erin thought, the mouth of a human is used for eating, breathing, yawning, speech, along with other emanations, and sex. Cats carry their young in their mouths, thought Erin. (84-85)

The flowing rigidity of the prose, with its encyclopedic bent and amused, insouciant, slightly in-on-the-joke slant, constitutes the novel beyond simply elaborating the events as they occur. Of course in one sense this is true of all books, but a loose commonality among Modernist fiction is the way in which the textures and specificities of their language—the linguistic surface—are themselves part of what the novel is, and what it is saying about the world. Again we have here the contrast between communication and expression; where the former prioritizes getting the point across (because the focus is on the entertainment value of the plot), the latter chooses carefully its words, because its words are itself.²⁰

Erin Adamo is a deeply realized character, and yet we strongly feel that the narration is looking at her somewhat askance. The scene with her parents is an important one thematically in setting up much of the middle of the book—which contains Erin’s own found writings, dealing with similar topics—but also does little, in the workshop sense, for the plot; we never see the parents again, and the novel doesn’t worry about their character arcs. More broadly, in a novel that spends hundreds of pages on embedded, doubly-fictitious writings by characters some of whom we never meet in the narrative, that sense of artistic vision is what sustains the reader, like being driven in a fast car late at night, a confidence in itself as a novel, one that it knows where it’s going.

It’s a tricky book to quote for this essay, because we’re talking about large formal structures most of all, which I can only explain (and not show). There are several tables of contents, attribution and copyright pages, epigraphs, a random page of a notebook, the prenominate electricity bill. It is a kind of madness. These things, along with the perspicacity and verve of Ives’ writing, make it exceedingly clear that what Life is Everywhere is interested in is the form of the novel, in language and its relationship to ourselves, in structures that permeate existence, or possibly do not exist. What it is not super interested in, is the plot of its elusive protagonist. We see Erin at the beginning and at the end, and of course we read a novel and a novella by her, which has the paradoxical effect of giving her character that richness which is so often sought, and missed, by more conventional writing. This is something Ives hit on in her second novel, Loudermilk, and while she didn’t invent the maneuver, it clearly sits on the leading edge of what’s currently being done in fiction. I’ll have more to say about this last point in the final section of this paper; for now I’d like to try and illustrate Life is Everywhere’s internal logic by studying Erin’s own first-person writings, which fit with that of the base heterodeigetic narration as variation on a theme.

I’ve never tried to tell this story. I’ve told plenty of other ones—and, to almost anyone who would listen, especially once I got divorced — but never this one. The reason I haven’t tried is that I’m not sure that it’s a story. It’s like I’ve removed myself from so many of the scenes and so effectively, that although I know what happened I’m not sure what relationship I myself have to the events. It’s like I’m floating on the ceiling, I’m sitting on the bookshelf, I’m laid out underneath the kitchen table, I’m tucked into a drawer—and I’m not that person, I’m not that person there who lives and speaks the words.

The other major problem with the story is that it does not begin. I’m going to try to talk to you about it, but it doesn’t have a proper beginning…

I wrote a novella for my high school English teacher. He was fifty-one, a charismatic burnout with whom I was in love…In the Middle Ages he would likely have attempted to impregnate me (using wiles, as I imagined it, rather than brute force). But for now, for the short duration of this modern life, he examined my language. His mind was a soup he lavished on us all. We were his students. He had not become a novelist. (19-21 [225-227])²¹

Erin’s taxonomic staccato is similar to that of the narrating entity earlier, while her pathos bleeds out a bit more freely in the first person, blending the base narration’s remove with her own total lack of assertion among a quiet self-assurance. The “found-writing” technique works best as something like panopticonic observation of a given character; instead of sitting down for an entire book with her in a room, we see Erin from several angles, both in-scene (in the third person) and by reading her own writings. As in life, this proves a great way to get to know someone. In that sense, the embedded writing method is a prime example of showing over telling, one enacted at the structural level, and as form.

It’s also at times funny, surprising, jaunty, sad. All the things we’d like novels to do; this is the point. We as humans have an indelible, primordial relationship with language, and the novel, as a linguistic art form, is meant to celebrate and cultivate that connection. We can see this type of play with language all over High Modernist fiction, and likewise in Modernism of the current day; I find that type of jouissance rather less evident in the type of mainstream literature discussed above. Form, though, can mean many things, from narration to structure to character to scene. It has to do with how the novel is constructed, less so with what happens in it. This compositional rigor is difficult, for both the reader and writer (although always difficult-with-purpose), and has been with us, whether in the shadows or in the sun, for all of the long twentieth century.

IV. The End (of The Novel)

Another, and final, reason for reframing Modernism as, first, our avant-garde commitment to form and, second, as something ongoing and perpetual, is that it very well may be the last word, at least for now, in The Novel. One possible near-conviction I’ve been orbiting, if not landing upon, in designing and thinking about my upcoming course is that the High Modernist movement of the 1920s and 30s represents a profound—and the most recent—techno-spiritual transformation in the history of the novel as an art form. I suspect the em-dash is the bit people might query. But what has the novel done, or discovered, in the last century that’s seismically different from what’s going on in Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, relative to the changes they represent when compared to Dickens, or Tolstoy, or Zola? I don’t mean, obviously, that all books today look like Woolf or Joyce; rather I mean that a system of intra-textual metaphysics, an ontology and an epistemology, emerged as a compositional first principle around the time following the First World War, and that this system—one that is both the way a novel might orient itself to the world and understand its own internal workings—became for a time the prevailing, or culturally dominant, novelistic mode before progressing through the last hundred years in various iterations, such that it never materially changed.

Besides everything on the sentence level—narration and the rest²² (most notably free-indirect style)—one thing the Modernist novel does, or fails to do, is enact a morality. This is intentional, and is a result of the skepticism the Modernist novel retains towards narrative linearity and neat arcing plots. We can see this amorality in the titanic single days of Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom, and in the linguistic purgatory of Speedboat, and the fractured superstructure of The Broom of the System, and in Erin Adamo’s bag—but we can’t find it in David Copperfield or (even) Pride and Prejudice. This absence of morality, as emergent from a lack of narrative linearity, is perhaps one of the three great inventions offered by the High Modernist novel, along with a prioritization of character interiority within a scenic-immediate structure and an elevating of narrational agency to a level with narrative agency. This last, and in a way all three, account for the Modernist novel’s fixation on form.

Of course not every novel written since 1922 is a Modernist novel; most take the other path, or an other path, which is more or less the one the novel was on in the nineteenth century. Most of the convention fiction I find myself frustrated and bored with in equal measure, published by the “big four” corporate houses in the United States, is essentially Victorian, not only in form but also, increasingly, in content: although naturally the mores have changed, the basic idea that a novel is a “socially improving,” and/or entertaining, method of communication has not. This is not what the Modernist novel is. The Modernist novel is, to repeat, urgently and inexhaustibly aware of itself as a novel, and seeks above all to innovate in form. As with Ives’ definition of the weak novel (which has much, but not complete, overlap with my notion here), this awareness is not necessarily or even frequently “postmodern metafiction,” although it can be. Postmodernism is much closer to Modernism than it is to being something new, especially as its fixation with self-referentiality is being done as early as 1891, with George Gissing’s New Grub Street, the novel with which I plan to begin my class.²³

As we slide well into our risk-adverse literary age, the Modernist novel, while far from dead, has certainly been sidelined for widespread acclaim of the Victorian. (Maybe we can call it “The New Victorian.”) Once again, the old friends are back at it. But there’s room for everyone, certainly in the literary community if not on the lists of the major publishers. We hear the reasons: shrinking attention spans in the social media age, the ever-septic economy, the lure of adaption from a plethora of streaming services, it’s hard to concentrate on good fiction during spin class, who has time to read anymore? Etcetera. It may be the case that truly innovative writing is virtually impossible, that nothing of the last 100 years quite reaches the avant-garde but instead recycles High Modernist agitations.²⁴ Some of this comes down to semantics, and perhaps then recedes into pointlessness. But there are some novelists doing fascinating things in the form, and if it’s not strictly true that the methods and techniques found in Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Sonya Walger’s Lion, or indeed Life is Everywhere have never been done before—if these writers are continuing to build on High Modernist foundations in using free-indirect style as their narrational engine, or constructing their books primarily out of fictive-present scenes featuring an interwoven tapestry of rendered consciousness and exterior detail, or depicting their characters in ways that see them evolve narrationally alongside/rather than narratively—it does little to dull their achievements. After all, Virginia Woolf didn’t invent free-indirect.

When compared to the larger, especially mainstream, ecosystem of literature around them, Modernist novelists in the twenty-first century are just as innovative and experimental as those who came before them. Ives’ theory brings this sense of continuity back to Eliot, as well: “Disorienting yet at ease with its own enormity, the weak novel suggests that what was written in the past may serve as an interpretation of what is written in the present.” Attempting to understand the Modernist novel as one that orients itself towards form can account for both Woolf and Ives, and the lineage connecting them. It also accounts for the mass of books that do not do that, those that stick to prevailing convention, presenting life as something prepackage and preordained, rather than mysterious, terrifying, challenging—with ample room for brilliance.

Modernism, like all systems of belief, is an attempt to engage with the world, to understand it and then return back to it something of the self. This means that there is inevitably something lost, and gained, in the exchange. The movement began by wanting to locate the human in the oppressive trappings of the novel, its harsh corners of convention. Such a search still seems to be a worthy one, an exploration that can push the novel, and those who write them, and who read them, into new and exhilarating spaces. No one said it would be easy. But really, if you think about it, why would we want it to be?

“In Praise of the New Modernists,” 2015. ↩︎
p.128-135. Interestingly Clark doesn’t mention it; he gives a passing reference to The Broom of The System, but leaves Wallace off his list of “great postmodern novelists,” most of whom are somewhat older. I don’t find much controversy, though, in labelling Infinite Jest a postmodern novel. ↩︎
I feel a bit badly about hammering on Clark’s piece—not to mention nervous about the lack of critical engagements I’m entertaining in making my argument—because I really do like it. I’ll say again that I think what he’s saying is correct, and there is a newfound investment in emotional resonance being exhibited by the novel, one that I agree is different and intriguing, even if not quite the break from what came before as is suggested. I just am not sure that it makes sense to call it “New Modernist,” when these books don’t seem to sympathize all that much with “original” Modernism, for reasons I’m about to explain back in the main paper. ↩︎
I want to reiterate this in a footnote: I’m speaking by and large here. There are quite a few American writers doing fascinating, legitimately avant-garde, work in the novel; most of them are published with independent presses and are fairly distant from whatever the “mainstream” might be these days. Additionally, there are a few novelists of greater repute alongside them. We’ll discuss Lucy Ives later in this paper; Ben Lerner (especially his most recent work) and Lucy Ellmann (to the extent she counts for the US category). Sheila Heti is Canadian. Across the Atlantic it’s an entirely different story. ↩︎
Amusingly, when a novel is called “experimental” in a pejorative sense (which admittedly is rarer these days), it’s often much more compelling and dynamic a book. ↩︎
Enter Philip Roth, whom everyone apparently would like to forget. He’s not mentioned in Clark’s essay (which is rapidly becoming our locus classicus), and isn’t quite “contemporary” anymore. It’s pretty easy to see why Roth has fallen out of discursive favor, given the rampaging shock-value of his novels and their blithe disregard for tact. But he won all the major American literary awards as recently as the 90s (in his 60s!), and is a truly avant-garde novelist who does a lot of the things which are now being called New Modernism, and does them well. ↩︎
Note that we’re not even talking about genre fiction here, or the boundaries thereof. This obviously all comes down to sales; few people involved in this world even really try to pretend otherwise anymore. ↩︎
All quotes from Eliot’s essay taken from its reproduction at Poetry Foundation. ↩︎
It’s a bit outside the scope of this paper, but a Woolfian realism might be thought of as the type of Victorian and Edwardian literature that emphasizes, among other things, fairly loud conventions of fiction—many of which Woolf enumerates in her essays on the subject—where “life-like” writing places a greater weight on, in a word, verisimilitude. ↩︎
A final footnoted caveat to my critiques of the New Modernist concept to acknowledge that the term, as defined in Clark’s essay, would similarly embrace an internal critique of convention, in that it finds an adding-to (of “emotion”) to what has been happening in postmodernism. My distinction, then, is perhaps one of a longitudinal focus versus a latitudinal one: I argue that by isolating “New Modernists” as something distinct to the current day, the rubric misplaces the very literary inheritance it seeks to examine. The choice, in other words, comes down to drastically altering the definition of “New Modernism” and making a somewhat less dramatic change to “Modernism,” with the latter option having the additional benefit of a more direct resonance to that very understanding of the novel from which both terms (ostensibly) derive. ↩︎
I’m not sure how much space or need there is to make the point that mainstream literary publishing in the United States is rather risk-adverse, and has been for decades now. Anyway, as with all negatives, it’s tough to actually “prove”. I suppose I’ll leave it up to the reader to disagree with me if, somehow and for some reason, they’d like to. ↩︎
I’ll have more to say about Lucy’s theory of “the weak novel” below. She and I spoke about this in an interview she did with L’Esprit Literary Review, “Contingency and Disobedience,” wherein she notes that to become a weaker novelist over time is “a really high compliment.” ↩︎
In American fiction, at least. ↩︎
Published in The Baffler in 2022. I quite like this essay, which I’ve taught in various courses. There’re intriguing connections between her theory and autofiction, Modernism, and understandings of novelistic form, among others. ↩︎
There are so many competing terminologies and taxonomies we could use for the various ideas now being discussed that I’m going to just leave it alone. ↩︎
There’s also an electricity bill, reproduced on the page in landscape format, which is excellent. ↩︎
I think of plot as the arc of events in the outside fictive world and narrative as the arc of character(s)’ inner world(s), but that’s more idiosyncratic taxonomy, which we said we weren’t going to do. ↩︎
I’m reminded of Wittgenstein’s sampling of sentences, in illustrating his idea of “forms of life,” from Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §23. ↩︎
A key example of this, and a book that I hope we’ll have time to mention below, is Sonya Walger’s Lion, from 2025, published by FSG. It is an excellent book, challenging and playful, firmly “unconventional” and the type of debut that nearly shocks one to see has been released by a corporate publisher—until one remembers the author is a famous actress, and it all makes sense. That’s not to take anything away from the novel or Walger, however, who is clearly a talented writer. ↩︎
That’s not to imply that mainstream literary fiction—and certainly those who write it—don’t care about language or syntax. It’s never all one thing or all the other. We’re speaking, in this paper, about priorities. ↩︎
It’s 19-21 of Erin’s novel, Hypergraphia, and 225-7 of Lucy’s. As she says in her essay, “the physical book gets in the weak novel’s way.” ↩︎
I haven’t spent too much time talking about narration in this paper, mostly because I’m in the midst of writing an entire book about it, Rachel Cusk and the Art of Narration, which is also, essentially, about Modernism. Forthcoming November! ↩︎
Of course there’s also Tristram Shandy, and Don Quixote, and the general sense that nothing is ever actually new. ↩︎
I have a friend, the estimable poet and professor Brian Heston, who thinks this, or at least it was his reply to our conversation about this topic. He makes a strong case, but I’m not quite there with him. I do find works such as Life is Everywhere to be legitimately avant-garde, and not only relative to their peers. ↩︎

References

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London; Harper Press. 2013 [1927].

Clark, Johnathan Russell. “In Praise of the New Modernists: Alexandra Kleeman, George Saunders…Experimental and Deeply Felt.” LitHub. 2015. https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-the-new-modernists/.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Poetry Foundation. 2009 [1919]. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent.

Ives, Lucy. Life is Everywhere. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf. 2021.

Ives, Lucy. “The Weak Novel: An Inappropriate, Indispensable Form.” The Baffler. 2022. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-weak-novel-ives.

Ives, Lucy. “Contingency and Disobedience.” L’Esprit Literary Review. 2024. https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2024/11/01/contingency-and-disobedience/.

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books. 2016 [1996].

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th edition. New York: Macmillan. 2009 [1953].

Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction” in The Virginia Woolf Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 1984 [1925].

Dan White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and the Publisher of Indirect Books. He received his Ph.D. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and is currently a faculty member in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he teaches graduate seminars on the novel form and directs student theses. His first book of criticism, Rachel Cusk and The Art of Narration, will be published in November by Indirect Books. He lives once again in Long Beach, California.

In Search of the Modern(ist)

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