What is Hysterical realism

How an insult turned into a literary genre

The term ‘hysterical realism’ was supposed to be the first salvo in a literary feud. While the feud never really took off, the term itself, despite being intended in a pejorative sense, has gained currency as a useful descriptor of a certain kind of contemporary fiction. It was coined by the English critic James Wood in a 2000 essay in which he lamented a literary tendency to cover up a lack of something primary with an excess of many things secondary.

These novels – Wood invoked Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Salman Rushdie’s Fury, Don DeLillo’s White Noise and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, among others -- were typically marked by an overabundance of cartoonish characters, a profusion of stories, and a surfeit of information about obscure things, all rendered in glittering prose running into 1,000 pages or more. For Wood, a conservative who believes that a novel’s mandate is to explore individual consciousness, these works were “brilliant cabinets of wonders” that hid a profound lack – “the human”. As he put it, in the hysterical realist novel, “the conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, over-worked. One’s objections are made not at the level of verisimilitude but at the level of morality: the style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality -- the usual charge -- but because it seems evasive of reality, while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up but a cover-up.”

Wood’s essay was so closely argued that even Smith, the immediate target of his critique, was forced to acknowledge that hysterical realism was a “painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth”. Her defence was that novelists write not what they want but what they can.