My review of Tom McCarthy's Satin Island is now available at Full Stop:
The most obvious explanation for the way McCarthy’s books have been received, at least in Great Britain, is that British fiction largely skipped over the phase in 20th century fiction generally labeled “postmodern,” instead renewing after World War II the British tradition of social and psychological realism (the latter supplementing the former as the only really lasting legacy of modernism). With a few notable exceptions — B.S. Johnson, arguably the early Ian McEwan, most recently Gabriel Josipovici — postwar British fiction has offered little in the way of “experimental” or “innovative” fiction of the sort associated with postmodernism in the United States (or, in a different way, continental Europe). . . .
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