The Case For Autofiction

In 2000, James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to classify recently published novels by Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and most infamously, Zadie Smith. Wood noted that hysterical realism had become the defining feature of “the big, ambitious novel” at the turn of the 21^st century, and that it was “now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful,” which Wood saw as a result of novelists eschewing “the representation of consciousness.” Instead, these novels focused on “information” and “connection,” mixing a dizzying number of characters, plots, and timelines, but forgetting that underneath it all, there needed to be a beating, human heart.