Reviewed by: The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention by David Letzler Christian Moraru David Letzler. The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention. U of Nebraska P, 2017. vii + 303 pp. Some of the readers who get the pun on Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction in Letzler's title might also argue that the symbolic paronymy frequently teeters in The Cruft of Fiction on the brink of a homophony even more suggestive of sematic kinship. For not only do the words "cruft" and "craft" sound similar and, by implication, hint at a conceptual overlap or kinship, but Letzler's discussion brings them closer together by setting them up in a correlation that runs the whole gamut from interdependence to complementarity to quasi equivalence. The critic reminds us that "'cruft,' a half-slang / half-technical term from programming circles that has expanded into general Internet culture" (5) and beyond to denote "unnecessary, inelegant, or too complicated" stuff that does not add anything of substance to a text, initially appears to be diametrically opposed to craft—that is, to art. So cruft is (or rather at first blush seems to be) antiartistic. Its presence in writing makes some of us reach for words like "prolix," and prolixity—most of us would assume—is not a desirable feature. Still less complimentary are "bloated gibberish" (31), "idiotic junk," "clutter" (32), "unreadable excess," "nonsense" (77), "multiword filler" (41), "glut of data" (82), and the other synonyms to which Letzler turns to designate "objectively pointless text" (122). The last phrase encapsulates his definition of the cruft most "meganovel authors" (26) incorporate into their works, and these writers include many great such novelists—in fact, Horace would want us to remember that even good Homer (not the one in The Simpsons) occasionally nods off, putting his readers to sleep as well. Dozing off and on—and other, less dramatic lapses in reading concentration—take front and center in Letzler's book, which [End Page 394] essentially argues for the major role cruft plays in the long novels of the modern and postmodern eras. This role inheres basically in "modulat[ing] attention" (16), an operation keyed to making sure our cognitive alertness is available when needed, so we can pay attention to what is important plot- or theme-wise. Such availability depends on our abilities to tune out and thus save meaning-making energy for significant, intellectually demanding passages. This is where cruft comes in; Letzler further claims that, by filling page after page with repetitive, gratuitously playful, or pseudoencyclopedic "gibberish" (31), authors provide us with not only a necessary respite but also clues for future narrative developments, conjectures, and connections that do count. This means, however, that cruft's "mimetic" relevance is also notable (42): seemingly pointless paragraphs may comprise pointed and precious references; more broadly, there are degrees of cruft, ranging from useless, opaque, or incoherent text to text that is apparently or partially so; and, finally, such material includes swaths combining the meaningful and the meaningless in various proportions and arrangements. At any rate, what cruft does matters a great deal. "Ironically," Letzler tells us, "the mega-novel's gratuitous text appears essential to its nature" (5). I agree, but if this is true, is cruft still "gratuitous"? Text that, from the standpoint of plot or figurative associations, may look like balderdash on page 10 may and often does make sense in the bigger picture that emerges no earlier than page 110, whether we talk about a diegetic detail already significant inside the presumably purposeless fragment or about a reference that, in the same passage, becomes relevant once we get to page 110. One way or the other, this is as much as saying that cruft always is, on some level, entirely or somewhat synonymous to craft, which is cruft's symbolic paronym or homonym, as it were—a crafty scheme in and of itself or part and parcel of, and perhaps a requisite to, the novel's overall structure. With a quick allusion to Tom LeClair's title now, "excess" has an artistic dimension to it—or, vice versa, art is intrinsically excessive...