Postmodernist Fiction by Brian McHale
Published 1987 · 92,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Nonfiction
How hard is Postmodernist Fiction to read?
Postmodernist Fiction scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- McHale writes clear academic prose but relies on a working vocabulary of narratology and philosophy of fiction: heterotopia, mise en abyme, trompe l'oeil, paralogy. None of it needs a glossary, but a reader without narrative-theory training hits an unfamiliar term every few pages.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences lengthen when McHale threads several novels through a single claim, but he favors clear topic sentences and numbered subheadings that keep the argument navigable. It reads closer to Orientalism's dense-but-followable prose than to Aesthetic Theory's paratactic knots.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- The whole book turns on an abstract distinction — epistemological versus ontological dominants — applied to dozens of novels rather than to lived experience. Chapters like 'The Zone' and 'Chinese-Box Worlds' operate at the level of narrative logic, not character or plot.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Each chapter marshals a dozen or more novels — Pynchon, Nabokov, Calvino, Fowles, Robbe-Grillet, Vonnegut — as evidence for a single structural claim, with footnotes pointing to the surrounding critical debate. The pace assumes a reader can hold many texts in mind at once.
How Postmodernist Fiction is regarded
Postmodernist Fiction holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.