The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolano’s 2666 by Stefano Ercolino (review)

The main assumption on which The Maximalist Novel is premised is that, despite several illustrious attempts to declare its death, the novel is not only still alive, but remains the most paradigmatic genre of contemporaneity. As David Kurnick has noted, the proliferation of studies in novel theory and criticism during the last decade testifies to its ongoing centrality.¹ Ercolino’s work, besides confirming this trend, demonstrates also that the novel, particularly the specific subgenre he is analyzing, can help us grasp the complexity and often frightening multiformity of extra-diegetic reality.

After acknowledging the broadness of his field of inquiry, Ercolino intelligently circumscribes a smaller object of analysis, the maximalist novel, which, immediately in the first lines of the Introduction, is defined as “an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then ‘emigrates’ to Europe and Latin America at the threshold of the twenty-first” (xi). Implicitly in this opening definition, and more evidently in the following chapters, Ercolino’s main critical reference is Franco Moretti (not surprisingly, the first person to appear in the “Acknowledgments”). To be precise, Moretti’s most famous proposition—distant reading—is not part of Ercolino’s methodological toolkit. Instead, The Maximalist Novel relies on and poignantly develops some intuitions of Modern Epic, particularly with regard to the novel’s utopian attempt to reach an encyclopedic comprehension of the world by “providing a totalizing representation of it” (115).

The Maximalist Novel is first and foremost a work of literary genre theory, where literary genre is understood as “a system the formal component of which contribute to a common goal, to the satisfaction of very precise symbolic needs” (114). Indeed, the powerful integration of a meticulous analysis of form with a discussion of the cultural and symbolic reasons behind formal choices is the greatest merit of this work, which also demonstrates the vitality and relevance in today’s literary scholarship of what has been (often derogatorily) labeled as “Marxist criticism.”

Having circumscribed the theoretical framework and acknowledged that any attempt to “sythentiz[e] the heterogeneous” (xv) cannot escape some kind of ideological partiality, Ercolino delves into the analysis of the ten most important features of the maximalist novels he is discussing: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, hybrid realism. These characteristics, Ercolino maintains, have particular functions, which fulfill different purposes—once again, formal, aesthetic, and symbolic. On the one hand, length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, and diegetic exuberance have a “chaos function” (xv), that is to say, they contribute to the almost schizofrenic attempt of the maximalist novel to swallow the greatest amount of extra-diegetic material—human, historical, cultural, religious, economical, technological—thus leading to a “complete dispersion and ungovernability” (114). On the other, completeness, narratorial omniscience, and paranoid imagination are defined as “cosmos function” (xv), for they counterbalance the dispersive tendency that would transform these novels into unreadable blobs. They do so by creating the fictional illusion of a complete and self-sustaining world. The dialectical interplay of such forces, Ercolino suggests, “ensure[s] the delicate equilibrium of the maximalist novel as a genre-system” (115). The clearness and accuracy of Ercolino’s analysis is remarkable; nonetheless, the declared attempt to categorize, systematize, and map the complex configuration of contemporary novels bears the risk of becoming a reductive schematization. A risk the author is not always able to circumvent. In this sense, the cautious introduction is partially contradicted by the very structure of the book, which—as the chapter division proves—is organized around quite discrete units. Nonetheless, Ercolino’s ability to justify this schematic morphology through compelling and critically rigorous arguments is a counterforce to a model that seems sometimes overly rigid.

Almost all the texts Ercolino considers...