I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy. It wasn’t so simple as wanting to believe that adulthood was a psychic untangling of adolescence, willful revisionist history. My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite. I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.

Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system.

Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at greater length in chapter 1. Briefly, Barth argues that all the advances in novelistic technique introduced by the modernist masters—from stream-of-consciousness to spatial form—were originally designed to provide a more accurate access to reality. Now that "reality" is understood to be nothing more than a construct of language. Since all literary conventions have been "exhausted" from overuse and have been undermined by recent theories concerning the relationship between language and the world, the postmodern novel would employ literary conventions self-consciously, thereby warding off the "death of the novel" by writing novels that dramatize that death. The end result would be a fiction that overcomes exhaustion by dramatizing it. Or, as Barth explains, "An artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world."'

The LA Times piece was not the only controversy in which Egan found herself during the literary awards season. After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, she was interviewed by Julie Steinberg for the Wall Street Journal. Steinberg asked her if she felt female writers are treated differently by the press than their male counterparts. In response, Egan briefly referred to the writer Kaavya Viswanathan, who had recently been found to have plagiarized the chick lit authors Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Megan McCafferty. Egan’s complaint was not that Viswanathan had plagiarized, but that “she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?” She went on to say, “My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower” (Steinberg). These comments annoyed and angered many, with author Jennifer Weiner being particularly perturbed that Egan appeared to be dismissing all chick lit, and Jamie Beckman glibly asking Egan to “not step on other women as you make your way to the podium.” Egan immediately regretted her comment, and later described them as “really stupid, ill-informed, and unfortunate” (Ohlson). Egan was also deeply affected by the accusation of sexism, as this was the type of gender-based dismissal and misrepresentation that she has battled throughout her career. As she discussed with Laura Miller a decade earlier in 2001: “I hate about myself the fact that I tend to model myself consciously after male writers. And I think that’s because again there’s this association that I’m very suspicious of that somehow men take on the big topics more than women do, which I don’t think is necessarily true.” Egan also spoke of her frustration with the critical response to her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1994), saying, “I’m a woman and it was a story about sisters so there was an immediate assumption that there certainly couldn’t be anything very intellectual going on there” (Miller). Egan has challenged such simplistic assumptions about women’s writing throughout her career. Furthermore, in their formal experiments and stylistic diversity, her texts also challenge what contemporary fiction can do.