Prize and Prejudice

New Zealander Eleanor Catton’s recent neo-Victorian epic, The Luminaries, an 832-page mammoth, has dazzled some critics—especially those who handed her the Man Booker Prize in 2013. But it has exasperated others with its “hocus-pocus” astrology-based structure, its overlapping mysteries, and its archetypal characters of many nationalities. Catton’s style is rooted in a history of structurally complex and often globetrotting novels—to some likeable, to others not— including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But Catton’s book underscores what has now become a clear trend: the grandiose, high-concept novel. Tim Parks, author of Where I’m Reading From, thinks ornate books like Catton’s signal the increasingly formulaic highwire act of what he calls “the dull new global novel.” He critiques the Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the…