A goal for this year—for the coming 2025–is to rewrite a novel I completed in my thirties about a man who runs away from an old age home to die on his own terms, of course against his families wishes. Now in my mid fifties, I can understand more closely the exquisite and horrifying loneliness of the end coming nearer, of a life lived but not quite in one’s own terms but now the window of possibility slowly but quickly closes.
I’m looking forward to using this full spectrum idea in my work, to use the novel to explore the many interior monologues of a single character. Deleuze and Guattari begin their great 1000 Plateaus by writing that since each of them is multiple, they were already quite a crowd. Let everything admit the multiplicity of possibility the—if I may—adjacent possible!
Very broadly speaking, the "cash nexus" or "realist" novel you describe doesn't get a lot of attention today, although people will still read them instead of much better examples like the ones you list. Franzen and Tartt are likely to have the shelf life of milk, since literary history is cluttered with their dead doubles. (Updike is a much better chronicler, including in terms of turning a sentence, and I'm not sure anyone will ever read him again, which is a pity.)
A long time ago Samuel Delany observed that reading Austen is essentially reading science fiction: a SF "universe" that is easier for us to imagine, perhaps, or even to identify with, but no less science-fictional for all that. To write in that mode now, the mode of Collison's list, is an archaism, the equivalent of a 2025 pulp novelist trying to write two-fisted stories of planetary conquest with atomic rocket ships. Too many things (physical, technological, cultural...) have been invented in the meantime for our pulper to be anything more than a parodist. After Proust and Joyce, a serious writer can't use Middlemarch as a model. Those two are the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary writing...and generally you can classify great contemporary writers in terms of which monster et 'em (DeLillo: Joyce. Roth: Proust. Hemingway: also Proust, lol.)
I’d suggest that Richard Powers is a VERY close match for what you call “full-spectrum” writing, particularly in the latter half of his career.
I'd agree with that, certainly.
I recommend Maryline Robinson Gilead , Home , Lila and Jack ( US )
Also Donal Ryan The Spinning Heart , Heart be at Peace & Queen of Dirt Island ( fallout in Ireland after financial crash )
A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry ( epic panorama of India )
Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver
Regarding who is doing this today… I thought Bonfire of the Vanities was in the same league. And maybe Norman Mailer
A goal for this year—for the coming 2025–is to rewrite a novel I completed in my thirties about a man who runs away from an old age home to die on his own terms, of course against his families wishes. Now in my mid fifties, I can understand more closely the exquisite and horrifying loneliness of the end coming nearer, of a life lived but not quite in one’s own terms but now the window of possibility slowly but quickly closes.
I’m looking forward to using this full spectrum idea in my work, to use the novel to explore the many interior monologues of a single character. Deleuze and Guattari begin their great 1000 Plateaus by writing that since each of them is multiple, they were already quite a crowd. Let everything admit the multiplicity of possibility the—if I may—adjacent possible!
Very broadly speaking, the "cash nexus" or "realist" novel you describe doesn't get a lot of attention today, although people will still read them instead of much better examples like the ones you list. Franzen and Tartt are likely to have the shelf life of milk, since literary history is cluttered with their dead doubles. (Updike is a much better chronicler, including in terms of turning a sentence, and I'm not sure anyone will ever read him again, which is a pity.)
A long time ago Samuel Delany observed that reading Austen is essentially reading science fiction: a SF "universe" that is easier for us to imagine, perhaps, or even to identify with, but no less science-fictional for all that. To write in that mode now, the mode of Collison's list, is an archaism, the equivalent of a 2025 pulp novelist trying to write two-fisted stories of planetary conquest with atomic rocket ships. Too many things (physical, technological, cultural...) have been invented in the meantime for our pulper to be anything more than a parodist. After Proust and Joyce, a serious writer can't use Middlemarch as a model. Those two are the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary writing...and generally you can classify great contemporary writers in terms of which monster et 'em (DeLillo: Joyce. Roth: Proust. Hemingway: also Proust, lol.)