Hysterical realism

Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism, is a literary genre characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.

The term hysterical realism was coined by James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, titled "The Smallness of the 'Big' Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman", which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic and was later reprinted in Wood's 2004 book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Wood used the term to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs". In response, Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth. . . "

The "hysterical" prose style is often mated to "realistic", almost journalistic, effects, such as Pynchon's depiction of 18th century land surveys in Mason & Dixon, DeLillo's treatment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, or Robert Clark Young's treatment of the arcana of U.S. Navy life in One of the Guys. This literary technique of extravagant treatment of everyday events can be found in earlier authors, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, and Herman Melville's The Confidence Man and Moby-Dick. Even earlier precursors include Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne and The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. A less "hysterical" version of such a juxtaposition of essay and narrative passages can be found in the work of Milan Kundera.

Prominent candidates for inclusion in the genre include: Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Christopher Wunderlee, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Safran Foer.