Sometimes people ask me what my novel is about

and naturally I have no idea, because it isn't really about anything, except perhaps my own desire to write a novel. I hope that will change.

I've also been reading a lot of DFW's nonfiction, and learning that he is/was very informed and very up-to-date about trends in contemporary literature and pop culture, from realism onward. He talks a lot about postmodernism as a response to realism that in turn got subverted and involuted, partly by TV, so that it became not a means of expressing something but a subject, which really narrowed people's understanding of art and made them cynical and indifferent, etc. etc. This seems like a rather narrow-minded and cynical view itself - though I realize I am short-changing his argument a little bit. But anyway, I bring this up in order to respond. He argues that current fiction writers are screwed, basically, because of the all-encompassingness of TV, because 1) any attempt at irony to make a point will be sucked up and subsequently ironized and mocked by TV (questionable), 2) any attempt to fight back at TV's irony will be a doomed throwback to fundamentalism. This seems dubious to me, but as I was reading I came upon a third possbility, which is neither postmodern nor hyperrealist but perhaps a new style altogether - possibly called experientialism, if it must have an -ism. What if literature could blur the lines between reading and experiencing? What if reading/writing doesn't reflect or approximate or show what's happening - it gets uncomfortably close, atomically close, to what's actually going on?

It might be unpleasant, tedious, overwrought, impossible, cerebral, prolix, or just not interesting. But maybe it's worth a try.