1 Crudo, for instance, is set during the manic summer of 2017-the summer of Charlottesville and Grenfell Tower, of the Comey firing and “covfefe”-and it’s impossible to read it without a shock of appalled recognition. Like Twitter, whose influence is everywhere in these novels, the results can be engaging and often quite funny, at least for a time. I am thinking, among others, of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)-short, frenetic, highly praised books, from which, it can sometimes seem, almost all the standard novelistic furniture (scene, plot, character) has been removed in order to accommodate the surplus of up-to-the-minute information. How much news, how much event glamour, can a novel absorb before it begins to capsize under the weight of its own timeliness? Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing their books to the point of bursting with headlines, social media posts, and other such glittering ephemera.
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