The Future of the Novel

In this jumbled meditation, novelist Okotie (After Absalon) takes stock of the contemporary literary landscape and opines on how fiction will evolve in coming years. Tracing the history of the novel over the past century, Okotie suggests that the dislocations of WWI upended the presumption of common worldviews and values that underpinned 19th-century novels, and that such modernists as Virginia Woolf turned fiction’s focus from capturing objective truth to exploring interior subjectivity. To the extent Okotie has a thesis, it’s that the future of fiction will likely look like the works of Rachel Cusk, whose experimental novels forsake traditional character, plot, and setting to instead impart meaning “from a non-anchored, non-centered ‘free indirect’ perspective.” Unfortunately, the finer points of Okotie’s analysis are difficult to discern. For instance, he twice asserts as one of his core arguments that “the novel has started self-reflectively thinking itself into existence,” but never provides a satisfactory explanation of what that means. His penchant for ivory-tower jargon (“architectonics”; “non-formative plots”; “autopoiesis”) and twisty, paragraph-length sentences further occlude his claims. Abstruse and dense, this befuddles. (Mar.)