David Letzler - While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation

David Letzler, The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-

Novels and the Science of Paying Attention,

University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elements that he labels “cruft” after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention.

While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.

"David Letzler's wonderfully titled book, The Cruft of Fiction, turns its attention to those passages of novels that are apparently pointless or redundant, and which we expect that readers would normally skim. These passages are what Letzler terms the 'cruft' of fiction."—Alice Bennett

“The Cruft of Fiction is a major contribution to the study of post–World War II fiction, as well as a striking new account of how novels—in particular so-called ‘big novels’—work. It is a truly pathbreaking account of contemporary fiction that will appeal to formalist, historicist, and other varieties of critic alike.”—Andrew Hoberek

David Letzler’s The Cruft of Fiction sets out to do many things. It is at once a study of “mega-novels,” or lengthy books with encyclopedic scope, and a hypothesis about how readers process difficult prose. It offers close readings of texts as varied as Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) and Dorothy Richardson’s novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67). It also shares new insights about some of the usual suspects of encyclopedic fiction, including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace. Skeptics may wonder how such a broad agenda coheres into a principal argument. I am not entirely convinced that it does, but I do find plenty to admire in Letzler’s analyses. The book’s point of departure is provocative and smart. Borrowing a term from Internet culture, The Cruft of Fiction suggests that what separates mega-novels from other big books is their “cruft,” which stands for overwritten, redundant, trivial, or unreadable text. Cruft has no purpose. In literature, cruft does not advance a plot or communicate anything valuable; it only distracts from those parts of a text that do have meaning. Letzler argues that the novels he discusses contain much cruft, from Flaubert’s detailed catalogs to Gaddis’s chunks of noisy conversation, and so they challenge readers to refine the ways they distribute their attention, moving from narrative elements that require careful processing to similar-looking text that can be skimmed or skipped without much loss.

Letzler positions his study between two contrasting views on the mega-novel genre. Critics either situate its eccentric forms in the long history of unconventional fiction, or argue that its excesses render visible the complexities of contemporary experience. Since neither side can explain what cruft adds to narrative, Letzler suggests that we need to find better ways to articulate how some pieces of text resist interpretation “without falling into the fallacious argument that the reproduction of chaos constitutes a meaningful response to a chaotic world” (9). Of course, across the wide spectrum of literary criticism, scholars have already found ways to express that point. Even within the boundaries of Letzler’s corpus, reader-oriented studies of recalcitrant text can be traced back at least to Jonathan Culler’s study of Flaubert, in which Culler argues against “the basic activity of ‘recuperation’ which one’s critical discourse performs.”1 Letzler’s decision to favor genre criticism over a narratological approach does not detract from the quality of his analyses of encyclopedic fiction. I mention the precedents, however, because Letzler tends to overstate his conclusions.

The six chapters in The Cruft of Fiction cover different generic categories associated with mega-novels: the dictionary, the encyclopedia, life writing, Menippean satire, episodic narrative, and epic and allegory. Each chapter features close readings of passages from two or three books. Together, these typify how cruft functions. The dictionary chapter, for example, reveals that the mega-novelists’ desire “to expand the boundaries of language” often degenerates into useless text—but “useless” for a reason (30). Letzler demonstrates how Gaddis’s J R (1975) buries some of its most meaningful plot elements under a flood of irrelevant dialogue and jargony language, making it an especially rigorous test of our attention-modulation skills. In a convincing move, he then shows how a similar principle underlies Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), which—although much simpler on the surface—repeats itself to such extremes that it will likely exhaust any reader. Balancing between revelation and noise, these novels narrativize how hard it often is “to distinguish between our most insightful and most nonsensical thoughts” (53). The ultimate dictionary novel, in this sense, is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In the chapter’s finale, Letzler zooms in on the Wake’s opening pages to show how their extraordinary blend of linguistic lushness and redundancy confronts us with the “entirety” of language—the possibilities it engenders as well as the restrictions it imposes (62).

Connections like these are surprising and revealing, and Letzler makes good use of them while he builds his arguments. In similar ways, the encyclopedia chapter draws both on Bouvard et Pécuchet and Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) as it explores how fictional encyclopedism engages the reader’s ability to order and retrieve information. The chapter on life writing does not involve any life-writing theory, but the parallels between Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) illustrate that the most inclusive representations of consciousness still suppress some aspects of experience while they accentuate others. Even the chapters on well-trodden paths in studies of maximalist literature, such as Menippean satire and episodic narrative (an umbrella term for the picaresque and the frame tale), adjust entrenched opinions while they refer to an extensive list of novelists (names that I have not yet mentioned include John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Georges Perec, and Haruki Murakami). The Cruft of Fiction overreaches, however, when it tries to gather its eclectic materials under one heading. Letzler makes a considerable leap when he claims that crufty novels can teach us to better handle the information overload we meet in everyday life. The argument from “cognitive training” (23) implies a surprisingly functionalistic take on literature, one that is based more on intuition than evidence, and I do not see how it transcends the critical fallacies that Letzler attacks throughout the book. Perhaps this is the fallacy of Trying To Do Too Much. Sometimes, cruft is just cruft.

Letzler is a determined reader, and it would be unfair to suggest that he could have done even more work. But the mega-novel is a much-discussed genre, and the discussion mostly revolves around literature in English. Despite its nods to Flaubert, Perec, Bolaño, and Murakami, The Cruft of Fiction does not correct that bias. Letzler finds an elegant solution by writing that his corpus is not representative but only reflects instructive examples of how cruft works. Most often his Anglophone lens makes perfect sense (although, as a speaker of Dutch, I did enjoy his suggestion that James Joyce invented the word “aardappel” [30]). The fact that Letzler only reads in English becomes more suspect, however, when considering his habit of generalizing the work of other critics and then pitting his arguments against them. Since this approach ignores vast bodies of work on those novelists who did not write in English, The Cruft of Fiction at times feels oddly disconnected. - Toon Staes

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/697604