even that book is charged with an antic intensity

While Leyner applied his talents elsewhere, literary history ground on. As Zadie Smith’s now-canonical argument goes, the standard-issue anglophone “lyrical realist” novel developed a severe case of neurosis in the years after September 11 and the endless war. As if it knew all too well that its neat model of the psyche could not hold, the lyrical realist novel started to filigree itself with an increasingly ornate tissue of preemptive self-critique, a simultaneous apology and excuse for its stultifying conventionality, its embarrassing fetish for authenticity. Smith saw an antidote to this neurotic realism in the “brutal excision of psychology” at work in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. No interiority; just neutral, surface-level sensations. (Recent novels by writers like Ottessa Moshfegh and Alexandra Kleeman clearly carry on a part of this affect-flattening project.) Two paths: on one, self-loathing neurosis; on the other, no feeling whatsoever. In such a literary field, one might wonder, where is the place for fun?