Jay Clayton's new book offers a lucid cutting-edge explication of the often stormy relationship between contemporary literature and criticism. Repudiating the jargon of theory, Clayton systematically makes sense of the movements of the last two decades: deconstruction, feminism. In a wholly original fashion Clayton succeeds in fusing a layman's guide to recent criticism with a scholarly work that directly engages theories of narrative by applying them to some of the most prominent American writers of our time.