There is a moment in this sprawling, magnificent novel set in the Vietnam War when an assassin, who has killed a previous target using a lovingly handcrafted blowpipe, is told by his handler: "It's a war. Go ahead and use a gun." The line accomplishes two things at once. It shows us the casually ironic brutality of the handler, and it resonates with other times and places in the novel [...]

What does a geek do when he's all grown up? He gets serious. Douglas Coupland's brilliant early novels, such as Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), were authentically zeitgeist-defining comedies of lives saturated in the cultural flood of late modernity. Yet, behind the wit and gadget-frippery, already lurked a small yearning towards some kind of pseudo-theological transcendence. And, as the vivid cataloguing of tech-pop culture eased off in subsequent novels [...]

You could say there have been foreshadowings. From Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), the great American novel of the second half of the 20th century: "My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it . . . he'd sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people." Elsewhere [...]

An alternative subtitle for this book could be "An Apology for Prose". If there is still a residual negativity in the word "prose", a featherlight condescension to what is merely prosaic, then Milan Kundera will correct us. "'Prose': the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life," he writes. "So to say that the novel is the art of prose is [...]

"Conceptual art" was always a philistine misnomer, as though literature were not already conceptual art. Now, arriving on a tsunami of hype, comes the first novel by a young conceptual artist, which riffs on the idea of a "conceptual shark" (d'après Damien Hirst's famous pickled fish) and transforms it into a book. Will the execution, as is so often the case with conceptual art, turn out to be secondary to [...]

A new novel attempts to trace, through bucolic family history and symbolic early traumas, the origin of absolute evil in a man whose name later becomes a byword for iniquity. I am talking about Thomas Harris's Hannibal Rising, the rec ent potboiling prequel to the sadistic Hannibal Lecter thrillers. But in terms of theme and structure, Normal Mailer's latest novel is weirdly similar, a kind of high-flown twin, advertising deep [...]

Novelists, the literary offerings of 2006 suggested, are suffering from a disease enthusiastically spread by reviewers. For those infected, florid similes or metaphors are the only index of "literary" quality. If a child's face is like a Plasticine moon, or a thought like a bruised peach, then we must be dealing with a Writer, otherwise known as a Stylist. Some critics join in, competing with their subjects to produce the [...]

Locked rooms are tantalising, from without (Bluebeard's castle) or within (Edgar Allan Poe's seminal detective story). A locked room can be a spur to invention, a microcosmic challenge: to make, as Donne wrote that love made, "one little room, an everywhere". Donne's "little room" was also his stanza of verse: enlarge the room and it might become a slim prose fiction, a chamber novel. Not coincidentally, The Locked Room is [...]

The Conservatives under David Cameron talk a lot about "social welfare". It sounds warm and fuzzy, but what do they mean by it? The phrase arose alongside "the welfare state", implying that the well-being of all was the responsibility of all: a responsibility discharged through the operations of government. Yet what it describes for the new Tories is almost the opposite: an intention to farm off some of the duty [...]

David Foster Wallace doesn't know when to stop. Whether reporting from a porn awards ceremony, or John McCain's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999, he digresses more than he gresses. Interminable anecdotes jostle with impossibly minute descriptions of trivia, and vast footnotes rain littler footnotes until your eyes hurt. The style is familiar from his essayistic fiction, notably the creatively exhausting novel Infinite Jest. His new book collects [...]