The key points of Steiner's critique:

I could no longer see why I needed to process 700-plus pages of esoteric ''in'' jokes in order to see the meaninglessness of modern experience yet again. Authorial generosity and proportion seemed much more valuable than uncompromising irony, and I yearned for fineness of touch -- beauty -- with the hunger of a starving person.

I don't think I am alone here. As a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1997, I found especially revealing the debate over Don DeLillo's brilliant ''Underworld,'' which did not win the prize. The novel opens with 60 pages of as glorious prose as may be found in any recent fiction. With its waste-manager protagonist, ''Underworld'' fits in a direct line from ''The Waste Land'' (and ultimately Dickens's ''Our Mutual Friend'') to the W.A.S.T.E. communications system in Pynchon's ''Crying of Lot 49.'' It depicts an American innocence lost with the advent of the cold war and multinational capitalism. The next 800 pages of post-modern convolution reveal that that innocence can never be recovered. For many of the judges, this was a Great American Novel if ever there was one. For others, it was yet another blockbuster metafiction, excellent among its kind, but of a kind by now all too familiar.

Consider an even more recent post-modern megafiction, Salman Rushdie's ''Ground Beneath Her Feet.'' A novel full of etymological puns and literary and pop music allusions, it is nevertheless retro in every sense of the word, wisecracking with the brotherhood of Joyce and Eliot and Pynchon and requiring a lot of reading to achieve what those geniuses achieved earlier and better. How many generations of clever, verbose metafictionists do we need concocting fables of absurdity? Not only have we already heard that there's no ground beneath our feet -- the post-modern theme with a thousand faces -- but we've moved on from there. The real challenge Pynchon so eloquently bequeathed us is to find a place for interest, beauty, pleasure and value in an ungrounded world.

The last novel I added to my history was Annie Proulx's ''Shipping News,'' the story of an extremely unpromising man who becomes, by the end, something of a hero. He does so not through paroxysms of tortured irony but through humility, dumb will and fidelity to everyday responsibility. The book's language begins as boorish as its protagonist, but stays with him, ending in an inspired, marveling prose -- irony humanized into a paradoxical hope: ''Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.''

Through this lyricism and concern for individual experience, Proulx deals with existential pain, but differently from the early post-modernists. For her, the absurdity of life can be met only by the assertion of individual interest, the same lesson that Pierce Inverarity teaches Oedipa Maas from the grave in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' -- to keep the ball bouncing, ''to take on interests.'' For Proulx, however, the appropriate response is not hyperrationality, paradox and the absurd but a kind of nurturing steadfastness. She stays with the nonheroic until it is imbued with grandeur.

If the post-modern period opened with metafictional fireworks, it closes with the extraordinary commonplace of love. And this is a fine lesson for an academic to have learned through writing -- and rewriting -- a history of contemporary American fiction.

That noted...

the escalator guy (whose passion for the escalator is funny, dammit! He's a white liberal, see, but he is passionate about slow somewhat-vertical/somewhat-horizontal uplift? Damn, that cracks me up),

I have to agree this is a pretty funny summation of the Well Meaning White Person.

I'd feel bad if people felt like this kind of metafiction style is some big in-joke for academics, and that they've been excluded. I do think Whitehead marks out a subtle and interesting take on race, that I haven't seen before. Lila Mae's reactions and strategies are built on a set of presumptions that could only exist for a minority who had achieved success in our culture. All of the fault lines - the distance between Lila and the other inspectors - appeared under the narrative pressure.

One of the central concerns had a lot of resonance for me: How do you successfully function in a culture where your methods and values and priorities are so different from the dominant strain?

Seriously, did y'all who took them at face value fall out of your chair when you realized that Fulton was making a convoluted joke?

Fall out of my chair how? With laughter? No. It actually made me sad- for Lila Mae, for Fulton, for the woman who kept his journals.

I think one of the reasons I took the I/E struggle seriously- aside from it being presented to me as such- is a philosophy discussion from way back in college. It was primarily a male vs. female. reason/rational vs. emotional/intution based philosophy discussion. The male female thing is not really the point- but the rational vs. emotional. The emphasis on reason, the argument went, was at the expense of emotion which is a valid element in forming a moral and ethical code- so much so that it's pretty much hard-wired into our makeup. Because of the focus on reason in philosophy and ethics, we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to make desisions that can rightly integrate emotion be purely rational.

This was the first thing that occured to me with intutionism. If emotion and intuition are hard wired just as much as reason (which for me was mapping onto empiricism- evidence to reach a logical conclusion)- why couldn't it too be used on a man-made system?

This was the first thing that occured to me with intutionism. If emotion and intuition are hard wired just as much as reason (which for me was mapping onto empiricism- evidence to reach a logical conclusion)- why couldn't it too be used on a man-made system?

I do think this is one of Whitehead's concerns and interests in the book. Though, personally, I like empiricism when it comes to engineering - I do think that allowing it primacy in the culture demeans the emotive and intuitive aspects of our culture.

To tie it back up in a neat circle, that's exactly the critique that Wendy Steiner is making in her article. That there was (at one point) a male/female split culturally in American literature, with (mostly) male writers pushing a technically brilliant, cold, ironic, absurd fiction with (mostly) female writers writing directly out of the 19th century novelistic tradition with a greater focus on rich, metaphoric language to evoke experience, relationships, interior life.

Which sounds kind of like a backhanded swipe and that the female writers were reactionary - unless (like me) you think the notion that literary movements are progressive like technology to be a shaky assumption.

y'all didn't find the part about Lila Mae's mask-face to be the single most revealing aspect of her character? I mean, every day she makes a face that just verges on causing her pain in every conceivable way, and then you wonder why she appears so blank & unlikeable to people?

I knew why she was so unlikeable, but that didn't stop her being unlikeable. As a result, I didn't care. I also thought it undermined the issue of her alienation. Even if she'd been white and male, she would still have been alienated with a personality like that. She may have had to put on her game-face in that world, but she didn't have to at home, and her apartment was just as devoid of personality. It wasn't just something forced on her.

Seriously, did y'all who took them at face value fall out of your chair when you realized that Fulton was making a convoluted joke?

Of course not. Especially given that he wound up taking it seriously, so the joke was more on him than anyone else, and that it wound up working. I did actually like it being originally a prank, and if the novel hadn't so frustratingly wizard-of-Oz'd everything else it had signposted, then even if not particularly funny, it'd at least be an entertaining twist. As it was, it was just another tedious diminishment.

The escalator guy, OTOH, was funnier.

The story doesn't necessarily take place before the Civil Rights Movement, as Billytea proposed, because Whitehead specifically rips the narrative out of real history and out of signifiers of time.

No he doesn't. He retains enough elements to keep it firmly rooted in a real time and place, with just enough tweaks to allow a place for his central metaphor (none of which actually imply any real social or cultural difference). This was one of my pet peeves, that his racial allegory was obscured by use of racial reality, and one several decades old too. I didn't know whether his commentary was supposed to be historical or current.

I'm lost as to how you would ever fit it after the Civil Rights movement?

I'd feel bad if people felt like this kind of metafiction style is some big in-joke for academics, and that they've been excluded.

If it was supposed to be funny, then yeah, in-jokes for academics sounds about right.

Seriously, did y'all who took them at face value fall out of your chair when you realized that Fulton was making a convoluted joke?

Well, they struck me as mumbo-jumbo, but then, a lot of stuff does. I sort of held it in the "don't know" category, waiting till I could get some more data. And then, the 'convoluted joke' revelation happens at the same time as the 'but he ended up being serious about it' revelation, so if I ever took it as a joke, it was only for a microsecond.

It's purposefully designed to be a hall of funhouse mirrors which reflects multiple distortions at us. It maintains a presumption that there is no One Reality to reference. That our experience is fractured and that fiction should respond to that kind of discontinuity.

Oh. This would be why I never got past page 100 of Gravity's Rainbow. I couldn't find a character about whom to give a shit. Seriously, I could probably have read the whole novel if it had been 100 pages long like that, but I was on page 100 of 700, and after a while I was just like, oh no, more annoying incomprehensibility! This would also explain why Whitehead mystifies me so.

to appropriate multiple tones with varying layers of irony.

I guess what I needed were big huge pointy arrows, saying THESE ARE MY FORBEARS. As it was, I had no baseline for what Whitehead was doing, so I had no idea where he was headed at any given moment. I mean, if I'd known what you all are describing, maybe I'd just have been annoyed with him, instead of appreciated him, but I think annoyed beats mystified hands down.

I'll agree with Billytea that Lila Mae was unlikeable not because of her game face, but because of her private face. I didn't always dislike her, but I felt like she was the poorest person of spirit I'd ever met. Sort of WTF to have that in your main character, you think?

I'd feel bad if people felt like this kind of metafiction style is some big in-joke for academics

Give that man a prize!

I mean, every day she makes a face that just verges on causing her pain in every conceivable way, and then you wonder why she appears so blank & unlikeable to people?

I don't wonder why she appears blank and unlikeable -- I can see that she purposely makes herself that way to avoid being hurt (worse than she hurts herself). I didn't find her an unlikable narrator as much as aan unknowable one.

It's notable that Lila Mae is probably the first black person to attend her Institute.

The book fairly explicitly says she isn't, and the janitor's closet has been set aside for them as a room. There's no housing, and the quota seems to be one black student at a time, but she is not the first.

Also:

I do think Whitehead marks out a subtle and interesting take on race, that I haven't seen before.

How so? It seems to me that, at the level at which i read the book, the relationships are as follows: White men have power and are Bad, or at best clueless dogooders. Black men make compromises to attain power but are (mostly) Good. Black women are Good, though they may also need to make compromises. White women are invisible and/or sexual objects, which is of course a form of invisibility. All other races are also invisible. I don't see anything terribly new there, though the way Whitehead explores it is interesting.

But I am rapidly feeling as though I'm out of my depth in trying to critique this book, as it seems I completely failed to get it.

I'm not sure that not getting it was our failing though. David and hayden, without the literary critiques and other materials, do you think Whitehead's points were clear?

I think his ambitions outpaced his skills.

I'll agree with Lyra Jane that the viewpoint of the oppressed, looking at the oppressor from inside the oppressor's system of power, isn't new and groundbreaking. I am thinking of the churning rage in Tiptree's short stories (on a male/female basis). Octavia Butler wrote a devastating novel in which a modern black woman traveled back in time to be complicit in the white/black, owner/slave, male/female world of oppression from which her ancestors sprang. ( Kindred, and it's in some ways as symbolic as Whitehead's novel, but much less obfuscatory and more emotional.)

For that matter, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes have both taken a crack at being black and inside the system that oppresses black people. (Himes notably wrote a whole series in the middle 60s about black cops in New York.)

I'm not sure what makes Lila Mae new and different? Can you explain?