Critical density award

Getting into black hole territory here with Adam Roberts reviewing the new Scarlett Thomas (slipstream Brit beginning to make a noise) novel, Our Tragic Universe:

This stuff is really neither new nor particularly profound. It goes back at least as far as Aristophanes, whose great plays Frogs and Thesmaphoriazusae are amongst other things expert interrogations of the relative merits and functions of heroically idealising versus deflatingly "realistic" art. Thomas makes quite a play with Aristophanes' Aeschylean-Euripidean standoff in Our Tragic Universe ("tragic," you see). I'll come back to that. But this theme, of the cleavage between the shape "art" gives experiences and the messy continguity and shapelessness of life, has been behind some of the greatest literature in the European tradition. It's what Don Quixote is about; it's the ground of all the playful shenanigans in Tristram Shandy (I was often put in mind of this novel when reading Our Tragic Universe, actually); Northanger Abbey plays it for laughs, sort-of; Proust made it his great theme; so did David Foster Wallace.

I count eight classic references in six sentences. No dead white guys problem with our Adam.

(David's been after me to post some thoughts about Thomas's previous book "The End of Mr Y", which I'm reading and enjoying hugely. Someday... but I will point out that the uses she makes of the same devices as Inception (four years before the fact) could be taught in schools as case study of why books are better for you than movies...)