MUST A NOVEL ENGAGE with contemporary life? One still finds the call, as tenacious as cliché, for novels that “speak to the moment we are in,” “work out society,” or otherwise “interpret the now,” insisted upon regularly in marketing copy and pieces of criticism, not to mention on Twitter. A better question to ask is whether a novel can do anything but react to—or reflect—contemporary life. This one is characteristic of a certain kind of Marxist criticism, which seems at times to make a point of noting that novels engage with the “now” regardless of their authors’, or readers’, intentions. And

“Reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held—I am tempted to say salvaged,” John Berger writes in his 1983 essay “The Production of the World.” “Reality is inimical to those with power.” 

There’s a Berger short story, published in the New Yorker in 2001, called “Woven, Sir” that reminds me, in a way, of this. It’s a story in which Berger’s adult narrator describes being in Madrid, waiting for a friend at the Ritz Hotel (with classic Berger observations around the sensual realities of class and wealth, as in his impression, in the hotel, of “the deafness of money . . .

The austerity of painting stripped down to reveal the threadbare lives of the artists; domestic strife heighted to the point of sublimity; personal memoir caressed by the ancient lunacy of myth; comic-book characters trespassing at the gates of high modernism; the love of books and cats. Frederic Tuten’s trajectory through letters has been uncategorizable, heteroclite, and consistently at odds with the prevailing fashion—so much so that he comes across less as a member of any extant school of literature and more as a Dada or Pop artist who happens to work primarily with words. His new story

It’s always been a sport to argue about the canon. I’ve never been one for sports.

When readers declare a desire to read away from the canon, I admire the instinct. It’s almost a predictable part of the cultural cycle: the resurrection or rediscovery of those whom the times have left behind or unjustly ignored. It’s thrilling to reckon with the work of artists never given their due—in recent years, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, Alice Adams, Bette Howland. But I confess: it rankles, a little, the cri de coeur “Read Women.” There’s a long list of reasons to

PUBLISHED IN 1974, Patricia Nell Warren’s best-selling novel The Front Runner, about the same-sex intergenerational romance between Harlan Brown, a college track coach, and Billy Sive, his star athlete, capitalized on dual booms from that decade: the running craze and the growing crossover appeal of LGBTQ+ literature. 

The book’s genesis was rooted in the author’s personal experience. In the summer of 1968, Warren, then thirty-two and an editor at Reader’s Digest, and her husband made a pact with another couple that they would train to enter the 1969 Boston Marathon. Warren was one of twelve