In his review of David Mitchell’s new novel, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” James Wood raises an eyebrow at the vogue for historical fiction among literary novelists:

… the historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern. (I am thinking not just of Mitchell but of Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Steven Millhauser, A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey.) What such novelists are looking for in those oldfangled laboratories is sometimes mysterious to me; and how these daring writers differ from a very gifted but frankly traditional and more commercial historical novelist like Hilary Mantel is an anxiously unanswered question.

Actually, I don’t think it’s all that mysterious. The incentives for highbrow experimentation in genre fiction were limned pretty well by Alan Jacobs just last week, in a response to Jonathan Franzen’s recent celebration of the kind of traditional realistic Victorian-style family-centric novel (think George Eliot, or Anthony Trollope) that he, Jonathan Franzen, likes to write:

I am inclined to think that that kind of novel depends on a certain kind of society, a society with elaborate explicit and implicit rules, and without the necessity of characters navigating those rules, just isn’t worth writing. In our society people can be whatever they want in relation to any other people and in relation to any branch of society, or that’s what we think anyway, and so there just aren’t enough structures of resistance to make the realistic social-familial novel work. We’re all internal, or (again) think we are, and the proper media for that kind of experience are the essay, the memoir, the blog, and maybe the lyric poem. The novel isn’t dead, but the kind of novel Franzen wants to commend will not have the kind of resonance he wants it to have until society becomes more formally and thoroughly structured. Which at some point will happen.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that such novels aren’t worth writing: I’m glad Franzen wrote “The Corrections,” for instance, and I’m quite looking forward to his next book. But such “realistic social-familial novels” labor under precisely the difficulty that Jacobs describes — the absence of the kind of social limitations on private conduct that generate most of the dramatic tension in “Middlemarch,” or “Jude the Obscure,” or “Madame Bovary,” or basically every single book that Henry James ever wrote. You can write an interesting contemporary novel based on the “Anna Karenina” template in which the heroine gets a divorce, marries her modern-day Vronsky, and they both discover that they’re unhappy with the choices they’ve made — but the last act just isn’t going to be quite as gripping as Tolstoy’s original. You can turn the Jane Austen template to entertaining modern purposes, as Hollywood did in “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” but the social and economic stakes are never going to be as high for a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet as they were for the Regency-era version.

It’s not surprising, then, that the place where the family novel still flourishes is in the literature of Asian and African diasporas, where characters always have at least one foot in a social world that’s more restrictive, and thus more likely to generate the kind of personal dilemmas that dominated Victorian fiction. And it’s not at all surprising that contemporary novelists would turn to what’s often dismissed as “genre” fiction — not only historical novels but fantasy and sci-fi, and hybrids thereof like “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” — in order to find stakes high enough to approximate the kind of suspense that a Tolstoy or a Thomas Hardy could generate, almost effortlessly, by simply thrusting a character into an unhappy marriage.