Here is a piece that contrasts the style (micro and macro) of traditional "big books" like Zadie Smith's work, with the new move to "autofiction" and memoir-like genres, like Knausgaard's My Struggle and Elena Ferrante's work.  It connects it up to changes in our technologies, especially our technologies of reading.  To be honest, I thought at first this was a critique of our current intellectual high culture, kind of like Franzen in the 90s, but then I began to wonder whether the author was actually--well, not quite celebrating it, but at least affirming its value as genuinely valid.  I still don't know if I buy that, but I agree he's making some interesting points. Check it out:

The novel thrives on social repercussions, and the fiction that was fashionable during the first 10 years of the century was no exception. Writers produced big, clever, glossy sagas of family and friendship, in a fretfully bravura style that reached its fullest expression in books like “White Teeth,” by Zadie Smith; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; and “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” by Jennifer Egan. They were irradiated by the conviction that an author could observe life at the turn of the millennium and repackage it for readers with a set of decisive, fine-grained interpretations.

By contrast, Knausgaard and Ferrante promise so little. But they give it. Each recounts, in the close first person, the inside of a human life. That’s something innumerable writers have done, obviously, but they seemed to do it in a newly dangerous way — with a pitiless, dispassionate modesty of ambition. Neither narrator extrapolates larger truths from experience. Both trust themselves as far as their own fingertips; Ferrante portrays the intricate social world of working-class Naples, but in a state of constantly renewed bafflement, while Knausgaard (“He broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel,” the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides told a reporter for The New Republic) abandons almost all narrative pretense to describe his time on earth as straightforwardly as he can.

The effect this method had on me, and I believe on many people, was one of immediate trust and identification. Somewhere in the stretch between Sept. 11, 2001, and the 2016 election, such limited claims to certainty came to seem not unambitious, but like the only sane rejoinder to the world as it had become. And the length of the books — their uncompressed, occasionally boring plots — created a profound new version of the self-forgetting that the best stories give us. To read Knausgaard or Ferrante, or indeed other writers of what critics have called autofiction, such as Teju Cole and Rachel Cusk, was less to enter a story than to spend a while as another person.

This suggests, to me at any rate, that something else is being noticed here.  That we have confused some kind of transcendence for some kind of immersion.  As if total enthrallment to another granular perspective is the only kind of truth we can have, instead of a genuine god's eye view.  That may be right.  I am not sure I want it to be right, however.  Remember the accusation about Kerouac?  "That's not writing, it's typing."  Well what he is describing doesn't sound like writing to me, it sounds like blogging.  (Yeah, you heard me right.)  It feels to me not like a wise humility, but like a surrender.  

But then it ends with this odd line:

writers like Knausgaard and Ferrante, for whom I fell just as hard as other readers did, suggest something startling and comforting: that in each of us is reposed something too deep to name or alter, and which for that very reason has survived, for now, the glittering surfaces of our age. A self, I suppose.

Is what has been described an entry into selfhood?  I'm not sure.  It feels like it's an entry into someone else's failure to be a self?  Or the prolegomena?  The first draft of a self?  

This is an even more uncooked post than most of mine.  This piece will stay with me.  Again,check it out.