[...] Whether one choose maximalist cleverness of minimalist epiphany-mongering, the deadening result, that lack of "something real," remains the same. If truly meaningful fiction, as Wallace suggests to McCaffery, "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness," and if fiction's great promise is to reveal our lingering capacity despite all our invitations to solipsism to still be able to make "genuine connections," then the banal commonness of the epiphanic mode "perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction." [...]