On Tantrum Literature

IF THE PURPOSE of art is to achieve some semblance of catharsis, then critics be damned, the novel is alive and well. It’s hard to keep up today with the number of blustering young American writers who use short little books as so many ways to blow off steam. These follow-ups and debuts are almost always about angry characters, or at least the pathologically resentful and repressed. People who are deranged, people who have little station in life but who should’ve, perhaps, had more: a let-down elite, betrayed by the cultural institutions—the publishing house, the magazine, the university—that might have welcomed and celebrated them 50 years earlier.