SOURCE: “Reinventing a Form: Aidan Higgins and John Banville,” in The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, Syracuse University Press, 1998, pp. 234-60.

In the following excerpt, Kreilkamp discusses the “Big House” Irish novels of Aidan Higgins and John Banville.

Among contemporary Irish novelists who write about the Big House, only Aidan Higgins and John Banville inherit the techniques and preoccupations of the experimental post-Joycean novel. Both dissolve the chronological sequences of realistic fiction, emphasizing traditional narrative far less than the exploration of individual consciousness. And both respond to and emerge from that breakdown of cultural certainties that accompanies all modernist writing. Higgins's and Banville's use of the conventions of the Big House genre as a catalyst for their innovations suggests the generative power of a traditional form. For each, the illusionary quality of Anglo-Irish life, its creation of fantasies of the past that fail to compensate for the...