An apprentice to the literary giants

This is the Way

IN 2010 the writer and critique Gabriel Josipovici published What Ever Happened to Modernism? While documenting the history of the modernist movement, the book also makes a scathing attack on contemporary English novelists, like Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis.

Josipovici accuses these writers of promoting a brand of petty bourgeois uptightness that is peculiarly intrinsic to English culture. Moreover, he argues that this bland prose style — which masquerades as Anglo-Saxon realism — has evolved from a terror these writers have of not being in control of the fictional universe they create.