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THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 16, 2020 67
nical dodges” of realists such as Charles
Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. “It is a
trick to make a heroine, in the act of
accepting a lover, suddenly aureoled by
a chance burst of sunshine, and then to
call it romance,” Chesterton wrote. “But
it is quite as much of a trick to make
her, in the act of accepting a lover, drop
her umbrella, or trip over a hassock, and
then call it the bold plain
realism of life.” Gimmick-
ier still, to Henry James, was
the novelist who menaced
a beautiful young woman
with illness or death, “the
very shortest of all cuts to
the interesting state.” James’s
late works, which Ngai con-
siders at length, threaten
women with something
different: the corny insinu-
ations, or verbal gimmicks, of men
who refuse to acknowledge the care
and sexual attention that women have
given them.
With the ascendance of modernism,
narrative itself started to seem like an
untrustworthy contrivance. The Russian
literary theorist and novelist Viktor
Shklovsky speculated that “plots were
mere motivations for tricks” and ap-
plauded novelists who displaced them
with illusions of spontaneity, “rough
drafts” of consciousness. But, of course,
modernism itself remained open to
charges of gimmickry, and not only from
reactionaries. Virginia Woolf, irritated
by the critical acclaim for Joyce’s “Ul-
ysses,” wrote, “A first-rate writer, I mean,
respects writing too much to be tricky;
startling; doing stunts.” Later, Roland
Barthes described Franz Kafka’s “The
Metamorphosis” as a “profitable gim-
mick,” because it fooled readers into call-
ing “Kafkaesque” the tropes—“solitude,
alienation, the quest, the familiarity of
the absurd”—that belonged to many
modernist writers. My favorite fictional
example of this kind of aesthetic judg-
ment is a scene in Elena Ferrante’s “The
Story of a New Name” in which a man
and a woman who will fall recklessly in
love ponder the lonely silences in Sam-
uel Beckett’s plays. “What does it mean
that life is more life without sight, with-
out hearing, even without words?” the
woman asks. “Maybe it’s just a gimmick,”
the man suggests. “No, what gimmick,”
the woman replies. “There’s a thing here
that suggests a thousand others, it’s not
a gimmick.” The conversation is enough
to suggest that their relationship is
doomed. It’s easy to fall out of love with
the gimmick’s dupe.
The closer we come to the present,
the easier it feels to enumerate genres
of literary gimmick—once-fresh con-
ceits about to curdle. In a world over-
run by advertising and mar-
keting, where “thought is
simultaneously reified and
fetishized,” Ngai writes,
“ ‘gimmick’ and ‘concept’ are
well-nigh synonymous.”
There is the gimmick of
metafiction, which, unwill-
ing to part with its one-time
trick of referring to itself,
has recently been rebranded
as autofiction; the gimmick
of writing a novel with interchangeable
parts or multiple endings; the gimmick
of structuring a novel as an archive, with
boxes, diaries, and found objects. “All
art becomes intrinsically gimmick-prone
after modernism,” Ngai observes, for
the simple reason that all art risks un-
dermining itself when it lays bare its
technique.
But if we are told to expect gimmicks
everywhere, spotting them feels easy: if
the propensity for gimmickry is all
around us, then it is also nowhere in
particular. The wider Ngai casts her net
for examples, the less significant being
netted starts to seem. As “Theory of
the Gimmick” proceeds, one senses Ngai
working harder and harder to equate
the techniques of artistic production
with the productive processes of capi-
talism. Gradually, the concept of the
gimmick begins to recede from intelli-
gibility, until one is left suspicious of
the category—of all aesthetic catego-
ries. And the more we become aware
of Ngai working hard, the more we
wonder if her high-concept procedure,
developed in the course of three inge-
nious books, isn’t something of a gim-
mick itself. “Somehow, you need a trick,”
Toni Morrison once said of what gave
the most thrilling writing its edge. Cer-
tainly, one could hardly imagine Ngai,
or anyone else, pulling this trick off again.
But while it lasted it was very good: ex-
haustive, demanding, and enlighten-
ing—an ungimmicky gimmick, the best
kind of critical pleasure.