I'm grateful to Michael Lucey, and to Genre, for his attentive and challenging, though skeptical, review of my book Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022). Thanks also to Genre for inviting me to respond. Having read (and taught) Lucey's own work on the novel, most recently in the context of a graduate seminar on Mikhail Bakhtin, I am interested to see what Lucey has made of my project, even as he is not quite, or not yet, convinced by its main claims or by the “model” of criticism my work puts forward. I welcome this chance to clarify my argument and to summarize one or two differences of approach with Lucey's own work that his review has revealed.
I wish I could assuage Lucey's (2023: 257, 258) experience of “frustration” and “disgruntlement” with my book, but these are subjective responses and Lucey doesn't explain...
