Comedy in Fiction

There's an interseting essay in Prospect magazine asking why there aren't mroe comic novels these days:

It would be useful to look at a representative cross-section of the finest young novelists of the US, the largest and most diverse of the English-speaking nations. A big job, but luckily Granta has just carried out the task for me, and announced its Best of Young American Novelists 2, a list of 21 talents. In his summing up, the chair of the judges, Granta editor Ian Jack, mentions death, sorrow, uncertainty and anxiety. "All I know is that we read many books infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on forever." (These writers are mostly in their twenties and early thirties!) At the end, Jack regrets the absence from the list of Joshua Ferris, "whose first novel… had the singular distinction among all these writers of making me laugh aloud quite often."

No loud laughter in the whole top 21. Twenty-one Apollos, and not one Dionysus.

"Why so sad, people?" as Zadie Smith asks.

Author Julian Gough then goes on to blame university creative writing programs and claims that high modernism makes better postmodern writing than does postmodernism. She even claims "postmodernism never happened."

An interesting idea, but I think it's flat wrong. As Dan Green argues in The Quarterly Conversation, a comic element is fundamental to any postmodern writing. Pynchon has it, Gaddis had it, Foster Wallace has it. It may be true as Gough argues that comedy is undervalued, but I agree with Green that it's essential to successful postmodernist novels and differentiates them from similar-appearing modernist novels.