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Is this really how loosely people are using this term now?
On Monday evening, the Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Public Library played host to Jeffrey Eugenides, an influential Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist making his first appearance to Toronto. Connected to the hysterical realism movement of writers like his Brown University classmate Rick Moody, friend Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace, Eugenides is known for his 1993 book The Virgin Suicides (later adapted into a film by Sofia Coppola) and 2002′s Middlesex, which won him a Pulitzer and a place in Oprah’s Book Club.
Of the four writers, Wallace is the only one who could reasonably be considered a “hysterical realist,” as the term has been used and (more or less) defined by James Wood. I guess part of the blame here is all those articles that are trying to connect Franzen-Moody-Wallace-Eugenides into a “school” because they happened to all know each other.
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At this point, “hysterical realism” seems to mean little more than “popular and acclaimed (male) writers of the last 15 years.”
+ Zadie Smith. Popular and acclaimed male writers of the last 15 years (and Zadie Smith).
Zadie Smith’s work, White Teeth, also go the “distinction” of being called hysterical. She wrote a rebuttal to Wood’s article.
“Misuse” is putting it mildly. What do you call authors who do Wallace-lite, like Eggers and Egan, “low fat hysteria”?
The term has certainly been used in a very loose and stenographic-y way by a lot of people, but if we’re going with Wood’s continually updated definition (after that first Zadie Smith piece), it’s hard to quarrel with this expanded hysterical lot. In his reviews of The Corrections and Middlesex, Wood found many of the same vices (and virtues) he had identified in the original set of culprits (Zadie Smith, Wallace, Pynchon, Rusdhie, etc). In his mind, at least, the term does apply to aspects of all these writers’ work.
Well, Wallace himself did Wallace-lite so often, I find myself worried even thinking of what Wallace-lite(-lite) might look like.
It’s a meaningless term, by the way. It doesn’t have a referent, or even an underlying sense. Just an empty category. The same way ‘postmodernism’ is a meaningless term. No self-respecting critic, which naturally disqualifies Mr. Wood, would wield -isms with such self-parodic ease as he, or most contemporary discussion of literature, scholarly or popular.
Just saying.