SOURCE: "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace," in Critique, Vol. 38, No. 1, Fall, 1996, pp. 12-37.

In the following essay, LeClair contrasts three roughly contemporaneous younger novelists against their innovative forbears, especially Thomas Pynchon, and makes his case for a new and scientifically more astute voice in American literature that broadens and deepens the commentary and critique begun by the so-called metafictionists.

Since the publication of V. in 1963, when Thomas Pynchon was twenty-six, he has been the reigning, if now aging, prodigy of contemporary American fiction, the gifted author of two prodigious novels, the 492-page V. and the encyclopedic Gravity's Rainbow. Reviewing the more modest Vineland in 1990, Richard Powers addressed Pynchon as a composer of bed-time stories: "So tell us another one, Pop, before it gets too dark". Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace all admit within their novels their filial debt to...