I began work on this book when a relatively simple problem turned
complex: I was exploring the influence that Vladimir Nabokov had on
Thomas Pynchon, who took a course from Nabokov at Cornell. But
historical reality--the world outside the text that alters the course of
fiction when two significant writers meet in a banked lecture hall--has
lost ground in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Postmodern narra-
tives appear to many critics to be metafiction: a fiction designed to com-
ment on its own textual and linguistic processes. More generally, critics
regard all contemporary writers who have abandoned realism as having
abandoned reality at the same stroke. In the prevailing metafictive cli-
mate, the world outside of fiction is assumed by some critics of postmod-
ern fiction to be linguistic and textual, by others to be fictive or imaginary,
and by virtually all to be beside the point.

In exploring the connections between Nabokov and Pynchon, I found
that I needed to redefine the aims and interests of contemporary fiction
and to place it in a new context. I had to reconstruct the extraliterary,
historical dimension in which similar fictions can make kindred sense, and
I needed to supplement the metafictive model with another understand-
ing of current fictional aesthetics. Once I had done so, I could not only
complete the project arguing for Pynchon's indebtedness to Nabokov (in a
study published in Contemporary Literature in 1983), I could also undertake
a meaningful study of a community of novelists.

My first premise is that contemporary fiction departs from realism

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