The Return of All-American Fiction?

At a time when readers and writers alike lament the diminished ambition and cultural place of American fiction, here come two new novels that, in their different ways, challenge and confirm that concern. Ross Barkan’s Colossus and Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline both lay claim to an old-fashioned grandeur. Both appear from niche presses: Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, and Panamerica, a spin-off of David Samuels’s and Walter Kirn’s defiantly offline newspaper County Highway. And so the reader approaches them eagerly and with a certain wonderment, as if they’re elusive, half-legendary beasts.