Volume 23, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1977
The Not-So-Light Fantastic
By Michael Wood
Falstaff
by Robert Nye
Little, Brown, 450 pp., $8.95
October Light
by John Gardner
Knopf, 480 pp., $10.00
Terra Nostra
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 778 pp., $15.00
People have been talking about the death of the novel ever since it was born, and it seems that one of the few things we can safely say about the form is that it is always on its last legs. In 1814, for example, an anonymous writer in The Critical Review suggested that 'the era of the novel' was almost over. In fact, the novel usually marks its repeated decline by looking monstrously healthy, and no one glancing at Gaddis's JR, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues would think the genre was wasting away. The three fat novels under review confirm this line of thought.
Review, 3550 words
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