“James Wood is the most admired literary critic at work today, and Dale Peck is the most reviled. Yet they share the same loathing, for a type of fiction that Wood calls ‘hysterical realism’ and that Peck labels ‘recherch? postmodernism.’ Most people who follow contemporary fiction can confidently name some books that fall into this category and can tell you what they’re like: They’re big, they’re full of information, ideas and stylistic riffs; they have eventful plots that transpire on what’s often called a ‘broad social canvas’; they experiment with form and voice; they’re overtly (or maybe just overly) smart. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be like.

Maximalism, to use this genre’s most reactionary name, turns out to be a lot less uniform than minimalism. If minimalism’s paterfamilias is indisputably Raymond Carver, maximalism’s is Don DeLillo — unless it’s Thomas Pynchon. (DeLillo is the star that some younger maximalists claim to steer by, but the less solemn Pynchon seems the better fit.) The novelists usually rounded up in this group include Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen (who wrote a famous 1996 essay on the ‘social novel’ for Harper’s Magazine), Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith and, especially, David Foster Wallace. But the books these writers produce don’t always have much in common. Some of them (Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ for one) aren’t even especially long — which seems like the minimum you’d expect from a maximalist novel.” (Salon)