I generally agree with Mark de Silva's critique of contemporary fiction's loss of "visionary" power:
In fiction, it seems we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to expecting, even from those we consider our most ambitious literary artists— a previous generation’s list would have included challenging writers like Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, and Gass—to deliver many of the rewards of contemporary narrative journalism: immediacy, a conversational tone, swift absorption, topicality. At the same time, our expectation of, and even our appetite for, profoundly transformative vision in fiction seems to have waned.
I would add, however, that I'm not sure that "we" have ever had much of an appetite for "profoundly transformative vision in fiction." All of the writers named here were frequently attacked for too strenuously "challenging" established expectations of "swift absorption" in works of fiction.
I have not read Karl Ove Knausgaard, so I cannot say if de Silva's prominent inclusion of his work among those lacking in vision is fair or not. The essay as a whole, nevertheless, is well worth reading.
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