Domestic dramas, written in the close third person, allowing access to the innermost thoughts of their characters. They wanted books that revealed their own lives to them, over, maybe, 500 to 600 pages of densely packed prose.

Readers still wanted stories with beginnings that built to middles that moved towards endings, novels set in concrete, objective realities, richly summoned, finely detailed, peopled by characters like ourselves, conjured into existence by authors who believed in novels being about something more than themselves, and other novels, who thought that literary theory was for campus lecture theatres, who encouraged suspension of disbelief, and promoted the nobility of the quotidian, and enough already with the ironic clever-dickery and the damnable, self-reflexive mucking about. Was the spreadeagled adoration of Foster Wallace’s sprawling, antic, superabundance of sentences not final evidence that the social realist novel was a beached whale that had blown its last? Not a bit of it, argued the serious young American writer. Also by a new generation, such as the serious young American writer’s good buddy, David Foster Wallace, who that same year produced his corpulent behemoth, Infinite Jest, with its footnotes to the endnotes - the exemplar of what the super-critic James Wood called “hysterical realism” The public, argued this serious young American writer, pushing his owlish spectacles up his nose, had been short-changed - neglected! alienated! - by the flatulent windbaggery of the late-20th-century metafabulists: Barth, Gaddis, Pynchon, all that mob, and even the serious young American writer’s hero, Don DeLillo, to whom he had once been in thrall.

From the fissure between the hifalutin literary world, with its noodly experiments in form and structure, and the humble book shopper, with her preference - so basic! - for old-fangled nonsense-like narrative and character development. A saviour from what? From the baroque perversions of postmodernism. Twenty-five years ago, a young American writer, very serious indeed, author of two precocious novels admired by critics but ignored by the so-called general reader (who is this shadowy figure?) announced, in an essay for Harper’s magazine, that his national literature was in need of a saviour.

Crossroads by franzen