A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel?

“[M]onumental in style though modest in scale.” Such is the view of a church offered by Marilynne Robinson’s heroine, Glory, in the Orange Prize–winning novel of 2008, Home (49). It’s a highly localized work that epitomizes Robinson’s long-standing effort to illuminate everyday observations, to render the mundane both strange and sublime, while showing how the deceptively provincial setting of Gilead has remained, for her, what Yoknapatawpha County became for William Faulkner. The very impulse, however, to write a novel that exhibits modesty in scale yet profundity in sentiment—that is localized in time and place but with a universalizing reach for emotional scenarios that any family might share—could equally apply to a host of both established and younger figures from the past decade. What has emerged, as I want to explore here, is a form of writing that seems at once new and old, an emergent practice that at the same time bears the mark of adaptation. This mode is a fresh departure to the extent that it moves beyond the timbre and tactics of representational self-scrutiny that were postwar metafiction’s stock-in-trade. At the same time, though, it is by no means an unprecedented mode in the sense that both its register and rationale have been debated before, at a time when novelists were facing a set of “crossroads” (as David Lodge famously described them in 1969) between realism and experimentation, just as postmillennial writers today—according to a recent review by Zadie Smith—have their work cut out in trying to “cut multiple roads,” because a “breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked” (71).¹ In what follows, I want to map the twenty-first-century renaissance of this mode as one that affiliates the way several important novelists are reconsidering how aesthetic attention in contemporary fiction can perform ethical and political work.

While in many respects their narratives contrast each other in either thematic focus or sociohistorical locale, these writers have each reanimated the idea that “the sublime,” in Martin Donougho’s words, has “come to form part of the furniture of our common world” (909). Valuing sublimity within the ordinary, they advance the possibility that after an era of postmodernist cynicism, fiction can mobilize perceptions of the mundane made marvelously strange, framing “the sublime,” as Philip Shaw suggests, “in a positive light as the means by which the beautiful is prevented from slipping into the merely agreeable” (149). Those figures I consider here retrieve in poignant yet unsentimental terms moments of sublimity from the onrush of daily experience so as to explore how such moments become the occasion for both individual and shared discernment that arises out of quotidian wonder. They can be seen to stage our compulsion, triggered by that very activity of wonderment, “to go beyond what is standing before us,” as Alexander Nehamas puts it (402). By dramatizing that compulsion, these novelists aren’t simply reaching outside the immediate sphere of concrete social actions to savor sublime events for their own sake. On the contrary, and more pointedly, they imply that narrative fiction remains perhaps the most effective and resilient artistic medium we have for proving why we should value such moments as socially or ethically instructive in the first place.

To characterize this effort as a unified and unifying mode—however fittingly it describes the shared efforts of otherwise different novelists—is to risk substituting a terminological convenience for stylistic complexity. One can avoid such pitfalls of categorization by working more diachronically—reassessing the pertinence of formal categories, clusters, and tendencies whose lineage sheds new light on the aspirations of writers working now. In following this tack, I want to reassess a term coined by Iris Murdoch in 1961, one that sounds anachronistic in light of the rather generic contentions underpinning it, but that actually turns out to be more relevant to writers in our time than to those from the 1960s and 1970s. By turns pithy and opinionated, the key essay here is...