Nemesis

In a passage that neatly captures both the nature and the problem of what is called "postmodern" fiction, a character in a John Barth story muses:

The British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow famously suggested nearly forty years ago that the West had unfortunately developed not one intellectual culture but two. On one side were the scientists, who could not distinguish Jane Austen from Agatha Christie; on the other, the artists, ignorant of…