For several decades now, and from many different quarters, the argument that the novel has exhausted its possibilities has assailed us. It has been voiced in a variety of tones, sometimes strident, sometimes muted; in jeremiad or lamentation; exultant or on the contrary disconsolate. Most astonishingly, and despite massive evidence to the contrary, the message that fiction has come to the end of itself has somehow survived in our cultural discourse. Like certain urban legends—the alligators in the sewers of New York City, for instance, or the idea that we use only ten percent of our brains—it just won't go away. Its very tenacity suggests that it must satisfy a need; and perhaps, like other easy eschatologies, it allows us to believe that things culminate with us. As wrongheaded as the notion of the novel's imminent end may appear when confronted with the reality of contemporary literature, however, it must also be recognized that it has exercised its effects upon writers during the many years of its currency. No less a figure than John Barth, for instance, felt obliged to respond to it, in a famous essay from 1967 entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," sketching a program whereby, through parody and irony, literature could turn the principle of its putative exhaustion to the purposes of its reinvigoration. By the time Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the death of the "great narratives" in La Condition postmoderne (1979), many novelists in France had begun casting about for other kinds of narrative models.

To be sure, the search for new models of narrative is a key impulse of "serious" literature. In the twentieth century, more particularly, it has been one of the defining features of the avant-garde, from its early days forward. Yet it seems clear that the pervasive notion of narrative in crisis and the idea of the death of the novel—which took shape as the "New Novel" began to lose the preeminence it had enjoyed—occasioned a great deal of anxiety among French writers. One of the consequences thereof was a burgeoning of literary experimentation of various kinds. Some of those experiments involved the hybridization of existing models in new forms such as "autofiction" and "faction." Others brought rigorous formalist principles to bear, in an effort to make the shape of narrative speak for itself. Still others focused on turning conventional narrative models back upon themselves, with a view toward pushing the boundaries of textual specularity to their limits and thus putting literature itself on trial. Certain writers sought to find narrative appeal in places traditionally spurned as being devoid of interest, sites such as the apparently banal fabric of daily life.

Fiction Now proposes to report on that literary experimentation in its plurality and its variety, taking a series of "soundings" within the compass of innovative French fiction since 2001. It is intended to complement my Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (2003). I should note at the outset that my field of inquiry here is limited to the Metropolitan French novel, and that I do not pretend to deal with Francophone literature, that is, literature written in French outside of France. This is not a matter of taste, but rather a question of competency (and undoubtedly, too, the symptom of many years of academic specialization). I should admit at the outset, however, that the kind of novel I have chosen to focus on here is very much a matter of taste.

Alas, I lack an easy term for identifying that sort of novel. The notion of "elite" literature (as opposed to "popular" literature) is too reductive, it seems to me, and too loaded with questionable social connotations. "Experimental" literature is generally taken to designate texts conceived in a rigorous formalist perspective, and thus may mislead when it is a case of experimentation in such areas as theme, style, or voice. A moment ago, I spoke of "serious" literature, and I also invoked the avant-garde. The kind of novel that interests me is the serious sort, then. By that, I do not mean that the spirit of play should be absent from it—quite to the contrary, in fact—nor that it should be devoid of comic effect. Rather, I mean a text that is devised with considerable deliberation, and which demands reflection on the reader's part. A serious novel is aware of the tradition that it has inherited, and it positions itself with regard to that tradition in a variety of manners; it puts its own "literariness" into play for the benefit of readers who are attuned to that discursive gesture. It is also at least mildly avant-gardist in nature. It questions (either implicitly or more explicitly) prevailing literary norms; it puts commonplaces on trial through irony or parody; it seeks to adumbrate fresh possibilities; it asks us to rethink what the novel may be as a cultural form.

Perhaps the term "critical novel" might serve to designate the kind of text that interests me here, insofar as each of these novels is conceived in a critical perspective, and each invites the reader, either openly or more subtly, to engage with it in a critical fashion. That dynamic, suspended as it is between production and reception, is of course hypothetical and fragile; furthermore, it is extremely difficult to theorize, and hard to trace using the conventional tools of literary interpretation. To my way of thinking however, it is just that articulative, interactive process which provides these novels with a mobility that is most refreshing indeed, and which (more importantly still) allows them fully to mean. I should add that this kind of novel typically does not top the bestseller list in France; nor, for the most part, is it gratified with major literary prizes. Nonetheless, I am convinced that it is in just this sort of text that the contemporary French novel finds its deepest resources, and where it seeks to renew itself.