By outliving the century in which we were born—a century of violence and upheaval in the arts as in politics—we have gained the luxury of seeing how the great movements of the time have played themselves out. How laughable it is today to remember Khrushchev at the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, pounding his shoe on the table and shouting “We will bury you!” In evaluating the effect of twentieth-century literature on posterity, modernism’s credentials are starting to look almost as shaky as those of Communism. Literary modernism, which was once believed to carry the same cachet of revolutionary inevitability as Marxism, has not aged well. In the 1960s, when I was in graduate school, three works, The Cantos, The Waste Land, and Finnegans Wake, were considered the ne plus ultra. For me, the only one of these that can still be read for pleasure is The Waste Land, perhaps because it is a kind of drama, perhaps because Eliot’s language is so classically beautiful compared to the babblings of Joyce in Finnegans Wake and the ravings of Pound in The Cantos, who, to adopt a word from the lexicon of Vito Corleone, now seems a pezzonovante.

Whether poetry has recovered the readership it lost to modernist obscurity is a question I won’t debate here. But both in America and even more so in the United Kingdom and Ireland, fiction has turned out to have little trouble retaining its traditional audience. The