The Prize is a kind of contemporary fiction called a "summer novel" or a "beach book." Its length, topicality, varied plots, and numerous moments of suspense fill a reader's leisure hours with diverting but not difficult material. The book is easy to pick up, put down, and pick up again.

Such novels have an ancient lineage.

Knightly romances of the seventeenthcentury ran to hundreds of thousands of words, featuring numerous plot lines and multiple characters to divert aristocrats in their inactive hours.

Eighteenth-century Gothic novels spun lengthy tales of terror over several volumes for ladies and gentlemen who patronized lending libraries in search of diversion. In the nineteenth-century "triple deckers" (three-volume novels) depicted the complex tasks of marrying well and getting an inheritance as a complex, time-consuming chore for fictional characters and book-buying readers alike.

In short, Wallace writes the sort of popular fiction that has...