Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (review)

Is it reactionary, or simple-minded, or just pathologically perverse, I wonder, to feel a certain wistful longing for the days when literary trends had names? I’m sure I’m not the only one to have found myself at a loss when a student—having patiently followed the long trail of isms that constitute the history of French writing over the past two hundred years—very reasonably raises a curious hand and asks, “And what’s happening in French literature now?” What confounds me is not that I can think of nothing to say, but that I can think of too much—because what that student wants is a name, an ism. While I am delighted that there is none that can begin to cover the miraculous diversity of the recent French novel, I also refuse to dismiss that desire as an obtuse or a ridiculous one. For all the incipient violence that lies behind every act of definition, I don’t see why we should pretend that a name doesn’t come in handy now and then. No doubt a name can be little more than a way of not thinking about a thing, or not really seeing it, but it can also reveal that thing, I think, in a light that might not have struck us before (would we really read Breton or Aragon in the same way if we’d never heard of Surrealism?). And so, no less than my bewildered student, I really would like to know: what shall we call—or at least how shall we think about—the wonderful explosion of fascinating novels that has taken place in France since about the mid-1980s?