Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the “maximalist” school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link “the individual experience of authors and characters to the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks”: “war, slavery, the social displacements of immigration, or any other large-scale trauma”; historical traumas, McGurl explains, confer on the novel “an aura of ‘seriousness’ even when, as in Pynchon or Vonnegut, the work is comic. Personal experience so framed is not merely personal experience,” a fact that “no amount of postmodern skepticism … is allowed to undermine.” The implication is that “personal experience” is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a “large-scale trauma”—or, worse yet, that an uncompelling (or absent) story line can be redeemed by a setting full of disasters.

This is the kind of literary practice James Wood so persuasively condemned under the rubric of “hysterical realism” (“Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister”). Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some “eccentric” perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House. As Wood points out, the maximalist fetishization of history is actually antihistoric: the maximalist novel “carries within itself, in its calm profusion of characters and plots, its flawless carpet of fine prose on page after page, a soothing sense that it might never have to end, that another thousand or two thousand pages might easily be added.”

“Thanks,” I said. The following Monday, I went back to the music building to look at the seating chart. My name wasn’t there, not even in the second violins, nowhere. I could feel my face change. I tried to control it, but I could feel it wasn’t working. I knew that everyone and his cousin at Harvard played the violin, it was practically mandatory, and there was no way they could all fit in a single orchestra—the stage would collapse. Still, I had never seriously considered that I might not get in.

I didn’t have a religion, and I didn’t do team sports, and for a long time orchestra had been the only place where I felt like part of something bigger than I was, where I was able to strive and at the same time to forget myself. The loss of that feeling was extremely painful. It would have been bad enough to be someplace where there were no orchestras, but it was even worse to know that there was one, and lots of people were in it—just not me. I dreamed about it almost every night.

I wasn’t taking private lessons anymore—I didn’t know any teachers in Boston, and I didn’t want to ask my parents for more money. For the first few months, I still practiced every day, alone, in the basement, but it began to feel like a sad, weird activity, disconnected from the rest of human enterprise. Soon just the smell of the violin—the glue or the wood or whatever it was that smelled like that when you opened the case—made me feel melancholy. I still sometimes woke up on Saturdays, the day I used to go to music school, feeling excited to go and play; then I would remember how matters stood.