What is the Modern(ist) Novel?

Belief in the novel as form

Today, we start a new venture on the Substack, at least for a little while—a serialized essay! Over the next four weeks, we’ll be releasing installments of a paper by Indirect Books Publisher, and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor, Dan White. Originally written for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago this month, the essay considers the form of the novel over the long 20th Century, specifically looking at the legacy of Modernism and its current status today. Does Modernism continue to exist, or have terms such as New Modernism properly replaced it in the ongoing understanding of what the novel can be?

“The Novel, Perpetual: Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form” will be published in the Summer 2026 Quarterly of L’Esprit, after being realised in four parts here. The essay examines Lucy Ives’ novel Life is Everywhere, along with her essay “The Weak Novel,” which is particularly apt as we enter the finalist stage of our Clarissa Dalloway Prize, judged by Lucy herself.

Part I introduces the class that inspired the paper, idea, and conference presentation: a graduate course in the Roosevelt University MFA Program titled (The Problem of) Form in the Long 20th Century. From there, we introduce the central ideas and begin our consideration of the novel form, as well as “New Modernism,” or something like it.

We hope you enjoy the essay, and you can read Part I below. Thanks so much for your support!

The Novel, Perpetual:
Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form
D. W. White

”Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal.” — Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read A Book?

This paper is emergent from an upcoming graduate course I’ll be teaching this fall, one that I hope engenders lively discussion about the form of the novel, as an idea, technology, or even belief. This class will be taught in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University, here in Chicago, and as such, I’m designing it to reach students as creative writers—that is to say, considering the novel form as artists working in that same (or similar) medium. Of course, it is also a seminar, meaning that an important goal of the course is to introduce students to literature they may or may not know, and equip them to think deeply and originally about it. This paper, then, is my early attempt at investigating these questions, in the hope of uncovering areas of rewarding exploration for our autumnal adventures to come.

Broadly, I’m interested in considering the legacy of literary modernism in the twenty-first century through a narrative-focused, text-centric framework. The title of my class this fall is (The Problem of Form in) The Long 20th Century Novel, by which I mean the novel more-or-less after Dickens, and occurring on either side of the Atlantic; for our conference today, I’ve kept my focus on contemporary American work, principally Lucy Ives’ Life Is Everywhere. I plan to encourage my students in tracing an evolving—and, crucially, ongoing—project of avant-garde poetics that sees a continuum from the High Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s through an investment in novelistic form into the present day.

Several questions will animate the course, and will happily serve as an introduction to this paper: How has the novel, as both technique and technology, continued to investigate and discover new formal boundaries for itself? What do we mean by “form” when talking about the novel generally, and how does it relate to other things we might wonder about a particular novel? Can we find a formal/stylistic lineage from High Modernist writers in the early 20th century through certain risk-adept novelists in the early 21st? Might we configure “Modernism” or “the Modernist ethos” as a commitment to innovation in form, rather than the standalone presence of such innovation, thereby freeing it from traditional temporal constraints while retaining its distinctiveness as a movement (and even belief)? Can this definition help us to balance proliferating taxonomies in criticism against threadbare mannerism in the marketplace? How can MFA students fit these ideas and queries into our own writing practice, and what might it mean to shape the novels we write around the problem of form?

In short, the focus of the class is on the question of form in the novel during the “long twentieth century,” a term borrowed from the field of history, signifying the wider forces at play in shaping society and geopolitics from the 1870s to the 2010s. With this in mind, we’ll set out to encounter the novel as an art form spanning a period from after Dickens to the present day, often but non-exclusively through the prism of Modernism, that enfant terrible of literary thought. Here I’d like to sketch a type of beginning to that search.

*

I. The Votive

The central question I’d like to ask is: how and why has the novel evolved (and evolved in this way) in the post-Dickensian era? I take into that inquiry a conviction in Modernism—somewhat alternatively conceived, perhaps, than might be typical—as the most important, surely most interesting, occurrence to happen to the novel since its formation. A great deal has been said about this topic already, of course; it seems lately that Modernism is rather less dead than it used to be. As a creative writer who teaches MFAs and who’s just this month finished his PhD from the UIC Program for Writers, I’m interested in Modernism less as a historical subject—and even less than less as a “theoretical site”—than as an understanding of artistic practice, as a rallying point for certain novelistic techniques and their associated rationale. In other words, as praxis: an organizing system of beliefs about what the novel (form) is, could, and should be; something of a cosmic background that a writer develops to guide their approach to their work. This is the framework through which I view my inciting question, and the responses I hope to navigate alongside my graduate students this fall, all of whom are emerging writers beginning to orient themselves towards the world as artists.

The first problem that one encounters in attempting to think of the relationship Modernism has to contemporary literature is that many people feel it no longer exists. I’m going to largely elude discussions about New Modernism (or Neomodernism), except to lean on a quick definition from the critic Jonathan Russell Clark, writing in LitHub, who offers the following: “This is the New Modernism: locating humanity, truth, and revelation in everything. As artists, they leave no emotional stone unturned. Because all fiction is artifice, the New Modernists see that even artifice can house meaning and beauty.” Clark’s essay, an extended review of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, is sharp and compelling; its being written in a popular forum deepens rather than vitiates the relevance to this paper, in that we’re interested here in the novel as a belief, not a taxonomical argument, and belief exists only among the believers. LitHub offers as good a reflection as anywhere of (some of) the prevailing understandings of contemporary literature by readers and writers.

The argument, then, for a New Modernism is one that sees some current novels as inheriting the maximalist expanse of the postmodern systems novel—David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Johnathan Franzen, Zadie Smith—while “reclaiming” the type of lived-in emotional resonance that the Modernism of the 1920s and 30s embraced (themselves retaining that from the Victorian novel, along with little else). So where Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner (each alluded to by Clark) developed complex, multifaceted characters with rich inner lives—“round” in E. M. Forsterer’s term—the endless plurality and deliberate, frenetic, over-engineering of hysterical realism in the last few decades of the twentieth century, toiling under the glare of poststructuralism, sacrificed real (fictive) people at the altar of the inexhaustible meta. Alright then.

I find this compelling, and I largely agree with Clark’s point when he mentions writers such as Kleeman, Karen Russell, and Ben Lerner, among others. I find two quibbles, by which declension will lead us into our main discussion. The first (and more minor) is the idea that postmodern novelists were largely uninterested in realizing emotional depth in their work, which seems a difficult assertion to make in the face of, say, the passage where C overdoses on laced heroin in Infinite Jest, itself surely the ne plus ultra of the postmodern systems novel. Reading that scene, it’s hard, and probably impossible, to make the case that Wallace doesn’t have the felicity or investment in building out real characters with compelling inner lives. This doesn’t really contradict Clark’s point—he argues that postmodern novelists, while not being “sentimental” nonetheless might have such moments in their books—so much as it reminds us that some novelists are better than others, and someone like David Foster Wallace or Lucy Ives might be able to express the sentiment along with the intellect, while others cannot. To borrow from the subtitle of Clark’s essay, I’d argue that some novelists can manage being both “deeply felt and experimental” more deftly than others. The point is that emotional resonance has never really left the novel, and while it may flirt with flamboyant abeyance, it remains in most ways the engine of fiction.

My second, and larger, quibble with the concept of New Modernism is not about (connections to) post- but rather neo-modernism. The contention that the contemporary novel on the whole is “experimental,” in any recognizable sense of the term, strikes me as generous as best, and rather mad at worst. This is especially true in the United States, and amongst major publishers. What’s taken for experimental writing—when used as a compliment—is frequently translatable as “a strange and attention-grabbing plot that interweaves one or more topical socio-cultural issues from an expected angle, written in accessible prose that takes occasional and modest adventures into techniques such as embedded text messages or run-on sentences.” While the language may often be sharp, intelligent, funny, and disarming, it’s very rarely difficult, and nearly never engages in the type of formal play and innovation that, for example, Woolf or Joyce sought.

This is not to say that current mainstream American fiction has no good books on offer—milage will vary for each to each; some I personally find quite strong—nor is it to say that difficult writing is to be seen as some sacral endgame in its own right; because it’s not, and never has been (not seriously). However, the streamlined plots and smooth prose of most contemporary writing is, at best, a sort of prima facie experimentalism that looks to serve the reader rather than challenge them. These novels often cultivate (or have ascribed to them) a certain mystique, a sense of strangeness generated from increasingly-routine literary devices—unnamed narrators and protagonists, fragmented structures broken into short chapters, vague-yet-specific settings, omitted quotation marks, the generally-nonsensical first-person present—that stand in for (are widely accepted as) the type of deep, committed risk-taking in form and style that permeate not only celebrated literature of the early twentieth century but also powerful, yet lesser known, fiction currently being put out by small presses. And that’s on the more experimental end of the mainstream novel; most literary fiction released by corporate publishing (the “big four”) doesn’t have, or want, anything to do with the term “avant-garde.” What I’m suggesting is that the type of work increasingly called New Modernism lacks severely any Modernism in it at all; it is formally anemic and fails to understand the foundational belief of the High Modernism that stands as its supposed forbearer: a refusal of artistic convention for the sake of artistic expression.

All that said, I do find there to be something like a “new Modernism” happening, one that I (at the risk of indulging in over-taxonomicality) would simply call Modernism, and ask that we rethink what that term might mean. This is also where the utility of “High Modernism” comes to the fore, as a convenient and more natural way of demarcating Mrs Woolf and friends from the current writers I’m going to insist we (the royal we at least, here in the formidable redoubt of our essay) also label Modernist.

Ultimately I’d like to suggest that by defining Modernism as the avant-garde realized as a “formal commitment to form,” we might be better equipped to reckon with Modernism’s expansive shadow while identifying the new newness being done with the novel-as-form in the contemporary world. On this account, Modernism is at once more narrow and more broad than typically understood; more exacting in what qualifies as a challenge to convention, yet more open in who (and when) are able to mount an offensive. To make my case, I’d like to look at the work of some contemporary American novelists who, I argue, are doing the “New Modernist thing” such that we might excise that superfluous prefix and celebrate literary inherence in the way that novelists themselves tend to conceive of it.

Thanks for reading. Come back next week for Part II—and in the meantime, stay critical!