ABSTRACT
Frederick Tristan suggests that the former, Baudelairean term encompasses his fiction and that of Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, Hubert Haddad, and a handful of other French writers. Already noted for his excellent book-length interview with Frederick Tristan, Moreau has gathered six other novelists around the banner of "The New Fiction", a movement christened in late 1991 and now fully under way. The New Fiction quarrels first with that formalistic, cerebral vein always so strong in French writers. Even harder than at formalism, the New Fiction strikes out at realism, at what Tristan disparages as the "pseudo-authenticity of the petit-bourgeois document". Common to all New Fictionists is a skepticism about the ontological solidity of the real world; hence their desire to "detourner le reel", to deviate the real world into a fictional one, into a parallel universe disquietingly similar to our own.
