Recently online theres been a lot of sturm und drang about a category of books that don't really have a particularly strict criteria but generally are lauded by a subset of literary cliques on twitter and usually published by New York Review Books, Dalkey Archive Press, or Deep Vellum or maybe Archipelago Press. These books can be long, short, translated, untranslated (in the anglophone context), Modernist, Post-Modernist, usually male authors but not universally so, the only criteria about the works themselves is they're capital L literary, in the difficult and dense way. For specific examples I'll quote from the Los Angeles Review of Books article (Against High Brodernism) that caused the most recent flare-up of micro-discourse :

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971).

The argument hinges on whether these books are lauded by pretentious posers more concerned by the aesthetic import these works have or whether they're the bulwark of literature against the tide of pulp literature, Young Adult dominance, or Romantasy depending on the time and circumstance. It can be a frustrating argument to see play out from the sidelines but there is a real comfort to know that this same argument has been waged decade before and likely since time immemorial.

Before controversial LARB articles about authors like Gaddis there were controversial New Yorker articles about Gaddis (Mr. Difficult), seeming so awfully familiar to the controversy of today and largely arguing on similar lines, accusations of cults of difficulty, etc. Written by the Late Boomer novel laureate himself Jonathan Franzen, its this specific article that sets off Steven Moore, probably the preeminent Gaddis champion, to set out to create a gargantuan defense of the difficult novel, by charting its long genealogy from the 20th Century BC to the conventional birth of the western novel in its modern form in the 19th century. Its a project i'm inherently sympathetic to, I do love the above novels and I am a sucker for longue durée studies.

The question has to be asked: Does Moore's The Novel, An Alternative History deliver on this grand quest to tilt at tut-tutting contemporary adult fiction writers and protect the honor of the complex novel? I think so but he is preaching to the choir on that one, but I can't fully say this is a great insightful work. It is definitely wide ranging, passionate in promoting historical "novels" (the categorization of most of the works discussed as novels would likely be very controversial but for me personally I don't mind), and very consciously focuses on titles that non-specialists would not be familiar with. The scope is good, but the writing feels at times too slack in regards to rigor and light on analysis for my tastes. Any time Moore comes across a religion in this book, which given the sections on Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Buddhist literature is frequently, he frequently makes rather catty remarks which feel almost dawkins-esque at times. In a truly strange aside he calls Tibetan Buddhism an idolatrous betrayal of Siddartha Gautama before returning back to describing Tibetan literature. Odd discursions aside, a bigger problem is this feels less like something of a complete theory of the novel than a very passionate man highlighting very interesting pieces of fiction across the world up to 1600. There's great value in that and if taken as a light survey of world literature I think it could help illuminate some blindspots in your readings, and may even lead you into literary rabbit holes to dig yourself into (I for one am truly inspired to read The Ulster Cycle after Moore's cheerleading). I just cant help but wish there was a deeper level of criticism than a rough timeline of secular(ish) fiction. Perhaps my complaints will be assuaged once I move from the first volume with its Mayan codices and Icelandic Sagas into the more familiar western and eastern literature of the 1600s to 1800s. Even so, I can't be too upset about a fairly easy read lighting a fire under my ass to read widely.