SOURCE: Williamson, Eric Miles. “Beyond Postmodernism.” Southern Review 37, no. 1 (winter 2001): 174–81.

In the following excerpt, Williamson offers a positive assessment of Being Dead, though notes that Crace is somewhat “overinsistent” in presenting his “Darwinian” thesis.

It's been a while since didactic fiction has garnered serious consideration. For the past thirty years John Steinbeck, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and others have suffered neglect if not outright contempt. Their works have been ignored or disdained primarily because their rhetorical messages are all too clear, and “postmodern” writers and critics have espoused an aesthetic that has little use for those who believe that art should both delight and instruct, who eschew the stance if irony.

These days seem to be passing. Even arch-postmodernist Ronald Sukenick, in his new book, Narralogues, avows that “[F]iction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation,” and we seem...