If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.

There have been notable rewritings, novels that self-consciously lift techniques and plotlines from Perec or Bernhard, from Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield , or—in the odd case of Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect , a beach-read best seller published this summer — from that scene in Couples where somebody hurts his pinkie playing basketball. There have been big novels published this year about becoming old-world by breaking your phone ( Transcription ), or becoming old-world by waking up in 1855 ( Yesteryear ), or sitting out the passage of time altogether ( On the Calculation of Volume ). And there have been, as ever, plenty of full-dress period pieces about Greek codices and the tribulations of G. W. Pabst.…