The earliest modern “circi” were glorified riding demonstrations, single-ring answers to that most ancient of questions: What do you do with your soldiers in peacetime? In 1768, on the eve of what the British call the American War of Independence, Philip Astley and his fellow cavalrymen of the Fifteenth Light Dragoons opened an outdoor “riding school” at a track outside London. What made their presentation a circus, in the sense that we’d know it, was that it combined the displays of equestrian prowess—including trick-riding, jumping, and military maneuvers in the styles of the Prussians and Hessian hussars—with interludes of clowning that allowed the riders and horses to rest, and were thought to appeal to women and children. [...]

And to a large degree the cynical side of me goes, Yeah yeah, America doesn’t deserve a Ringling Bros. It really doesn’t. Because for 146 years we’ve been teaching you. Yeah. How we can all live together, how we can all work together, to make something beautiful. How every person matters, every job, and this is what we’re mourning. Not a show but a society. Lots of shows close down but this is a society. Black, white, woman, man, performer, or crew, everyone’s equal here, everyone’s important. You know, since I’ve been here I’ve developed a great affection for animals, but seriously, I’m from New York City, I’m from Harlem; before the circus the most exotic animal I’d ever been around was a squirrel, so I’m not going to get into that cage with the cats, I’m not going to get up on that trapeze bar, but we each have our own role, which gives us dignity. My first dressing roommate, Mark, was as white as day and he wouldn’t go on to perform unless this one member of the floor crew, Rafael Suarez, who’s Mexican, had rigged his apparatus, and they didn’t even speak the same language; they just talked with their hands. But they had this mutual respect. This sense of responsibility for each other. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in the circus, about humanity, about being an artist, about making art and how to sell art, which is also an art, which the circus did a lot to invent, this was the most profound. That you’re responsible. I am. We are. For each other. You understand? And that’s what the circus is. Just what its name says it is. What does it mean? From the Latin. From the Greek. It’s a circle.

HE GOVERNMENTS THAT GET THEMED into casino-hotel-resort properties tend not to be democracies, but oligarchies, aristocracies, monarchies, Africa-and-Asia-devouring empires. Pharaonic Egypt, Doge-age Venice, imperial Rome, Mughal India. Atlantic City has incarnations of the latter two—Caesars Atlantic City and the Trump Taj Mahal—with the Taj being the last property in the city to bear the Republican candidate’s name, though it’s owned by distressed-asset czar Carl Icahn, who also owns the Tropicana, a crumbling heap styled after the Casa de Justicia of some amorphous banana republic. The worse the regime, the better the chance of its simulacrum’s survival. Atlantic City’s Revel, a hulking fin-like erection of concrete, steel, and glass that cost in the neighborhood of $2.4 billion, opened in 2012 only to close in 2014, which just goes to show that an abstract noun, verb, or imperative in search of punctuation (Revel!) doesn’t have quite the same cachet as a lost homicidal culture.

I FOUND MYSELF—AMERICA finds itself now—at the very end of the Boardwalk. The very end of this immigrant’s midway lined with cheap thrills and junk concessions, pulsating with tawdry neon and clamoring moronically. The end of this corny, schmaltzy Trumpian thoroughfare that entertains us with its patter and enthralls us with its lies.

It was the web that educated me about contemporary literature, not through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there, but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what Pynchon—and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—were working toward in fiction: a plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections), and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I read about Modernism—big “M”—and postmodernism—small “p”—thanks to links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made by and intended for a limited but discerning audience; postmodernism, by contrast, had popular or populist aspirations—it wanted to be famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom LeClair to describe the complicative methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph McElroy—and Pynchon.

“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).

Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.

By contrast, the techniques that Lish imposed on his own fiction, and that he advocated for decades in the notorious non-MFA writing workshops he ran after leaving Knopf (workshops in which he mentored, among others, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams), are considerably simpler to articulate. “Recursion” is Lish’s fancy term for unfancy “repetition”; “consecution” is a catch-all concept for the ways in which the grammatical or phonic qualities of a word, or the structure of a sentence, can be brought to bear on the choice of the word or the structure of the sentence that follows; “swerve,” meanwhile, is Lish’s method for frustrating “recursion” and “consecution,” by introducing into the body of a fiction a theme, or narrative vantage, which hadn’t been used before, and is not logically, structurally, or phonically expected. This trinity of techniques is so prevalent in Lish’s work as to read like a trinity of tics. Take the fiction entitled “The Practice of Everyday Life,” in which the recursion abounds, the consecution hinges on the polysemy of “come” and the opposition of “out loud” and “aloud,” while the swerve is accomplished with the belated identification of the narrator’s audience or occasion:

WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY

When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had: nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the Q/N/R trains, nothing to talk about to my aunt, her mom, the pizza guy, over decent but insufferable sushi, in the movie line. When the bun place closed. The midnight-movie theater in Midtown. When the deli that did its own pastramitizing shut down too. I’d always liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable. We broke up and stayed the children we’d never have.

What Lanier calls this type of redistribution: “The humanistic information economy.”

How disappointed is this reviewer in Lanier: Enough to end our relationship, despite forfeiture of any future “nanopayments.”

Zola, born in 1840, two years before Stendhal died, and one year after the appearance of the daguerreotype—the first commercially practical photographic process—referred to this impossible reproduction of a consensus reality as “idealism,” and opposed it with “naturalism,” which characterized novels that sought to expose the forces that produced that consensus. The naturalist novel, from its birth in the late nineteenth century through its disguised heyday in the twentieth, has been precisely about how reality is “made,” as distinct from what reality “is.”

Zola defined this naturalistic approach in an essay that responded to a medical text by a contemporary, the physiologist Claude Bernard, which attempted to transfer the scientific method governing experimentation in chemistry to the precincts of biology—the treatment of disease. It was Zola’s goal to diagnose French society as a doctor would a patient’s body: by analyzing its comorbid maladies one at a time, with a nib as sharp as a scalpel. Only after this diagnosis would treatment—extraliterary, political treatment—be possible.