Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia M rquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts,...