Gazing into One’s Own Head

A QUARTER CENTURY OF steady competence has made it easy for us to forget that the history of the novel is a history of monsters: Don Quixote. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Watt. No sooner does the reading public get comfortable (and bored) with a particular set of expectations than the surface of the genre trembles, threatening to belch up a kaiju whose bug-eyed weirdness will make us grab our children and run screaming toward the parking lot.