In what seems an aeon ago, and perhaps was, Lionel Trilling conducted an interesting thought experiment by trying to envision a future for fiction. Since “social class and the conflicts it produces” were now exhausted as subjects, what if novelists turned instead to the new emerging fact of our collective life, “the organization of society into ideological groups?” If you looked closely at competing ideologies and the people committed to them, you might find “nearly as full a range of passion and nearly as complex a system of manners as a society based on social class. Its promise of comedy and tragedy is enormous.” Ideology began with politics but didn’t end there. It had seeped into the hidden corners of day-to-day experience, its invisible hand guiding even the smallest, most ordinary, and most intimate transactions, usually without our knowing it. People became ideologized despite themselves, “by breathing the haunted air,” and so entered “a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit.”

Trilling wrote that in 1948, at the dawn of the cold war, and for many years his literary prescription seemed a misfire—the fault, in all likelihood, of his own embroilment in the ideological soul-searching of his generation: the 1930s radicals who were drawn to communism but later discovered the facts of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. This disillusionment informed Trilling’s own novel about ideological conflict, The Middle of the Journey (1947), a stab toward the new fiction he had in mind. It is sensible and sensitive, but more cultural seminar than work of imagination. The “issues” it dissects—the delusions of fellow travelers, the shallowness of the modern liberal when forced to confront the depth and reach of Soviet crimes, the progressive belief in the future that rested on an almost childlike denial of death—felt bloodless and beside the point at a time when the developing story was no longer the false lure of communism but the blazing forth of the affluent society.

Yet as usual, Trilling had grasped something solid. The ideological novel was, in fact, taking shape. It just wasn’t following the precise lines he proposed. There was, for instance, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written the same year as Trilling’s essay. Though usually read as dark prophecy of a Stalinized future, it actually satirized the increasingly bureaucratized cold war state, “the managerial revolution” that had transformed the capitalist democracies as well as the socialist dictatorships, reducing the citizenry to automatons. In the next decades, from the 1950s through the 1970s, the ideological novel flourished in America too, as a kind of art-house protest literature. Its maestros were “paranoid” writers like William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick. Their subjects included technology, information, “the mass media of communication”—as it was then called—and the manipulations they made possible and then inescapable.

These writers’ ironies reflected growing skepticism toward the official politics of the cold war. The “twilight struggle” between the virtuous U.S. and the evil USSR had come to resemble a danse macabre, each colossus the mirror image of the other: the military gigantism and doomsday weapons systems, the government-supported culture programs, the climate of “consensus” (or conformism) with its boiling inner life of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (in Richard Hofstadter’s formulation of the “paranoid style”).

Out of all this came an extraordinarily rich literature that ranged from the dreamlike reportage in Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago to bewildering metafiction machines, such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’s The Recognitions—noir melodramas chilled by the vocabulary of high rationality. In some places, they read like tech manuals or physics texts; in others, like arcane medieval treatises. But while you could trace the printed circuitry, you couldn’t quite see how it all connected. Then again, maybe the wires were meant to dangle loosely, a subversive thrust against the idea of the closed system in the interest of recovering a more spontaneous art.