Salon knows. Interesting article on "maximalism" or "hysterical realism" or "recherché postmodernism" or whatever you want to call it--I believe Pclem prefers the simple and elegant "poop"--a literary style which some (at least two) critics think is killing the novel.

For my part I basically agree with Laura Miller. As I've said before, Infinite Jest didn't do much of anything for me, though I loved White Teeth by Zadie Smith (and like everyone else hated The Autograph Man.) I like DeLillo, too, a lot--I've been meaning to post something about DeLillo just as soon as I finish off Mao II, which is taking me a while. Short version: I think everyone interested in language and literature should read White Noise. It's an immensely important novel. And Libra (the Kennedy assassination novel from Oswald's perspective) is great too.

I enjoyed Franzen's The Corrections a whole lot and bought it for my mother, though it really is about 100 pages too long. I've never really dug Pyncheon, but I'm still going to read Gravity's Rainbow someday. And the great granddaddy of them all, Ulysses, is incredible; you wouldn't want to throw that out.

Even my little-known, much-beloved The Mezzanine, the story of a man climbing the escalator after his lunch break (which surely qualifies as hysterical realism/maximalism/poop) is a great and funny novel, not overly long (150 pages), though it is focused on hilarious theoretical disgressions rather than plot. But it's great, and funny. There are a lot of books in this subsubgenre we wouldn't want to do without.

But for every book like this I like, there seems to remain an immense number of books (often by the very same authors) that are simply unreadable. Like Raymond Carver's minimalism, maximalism seems to have the potential to completely destroy one's ability to write, once you allow it to get in the way of your story. You can take it too damn far.

Just write a good book, I guess is my point, and I'll party with your aesthetic vision. Otherwise, you suck.