The Witch of Exmoor.

Poor Margaret Drabble.

Once princess and heiress-apparent to the throne of British intellectual letters - Iris Murdoch shows no sign of abdicating any time soon - she has in the last decade seen her position usurped by the posings of her romantic half-sister, A.S. Byatt. Certainly Byatt's talent is wildly overrated, but much of the blame must be placed on Drabble's shoulders. In the '60s and '70s Drabble was a sharp critic of half-baked social programs put forward by both left and right; like Dickens and Lawrence, she wrote socially astute dramatic novels, but at some point her critical sense overran her dramatic sense, and her novels disappeared behind a wall of commentary. Alas, The Witch of Exmoor, Drabble's newest offering, seems to have furthered its author's decline. Panned in England and ignored here, the novel is being marketed as having "the makings of a thriller," which may be the most literally honest jacket copy I've ever read. The Witch of Exmoor is, in fact, a novel in the making - perhaps a thriller, perhaps a family saga, perhaps even a work of social commentary.

The trouble begins with the second line. "Let them have everything that is pleasant," Drabble writes, and, though she doesn't say it straight out, the implied subject of that sentence is "you," meaning the reader. The reader can let them have everything that is pleasant, because the author can't be bothered to make more than a cursory effort at giving her characters character, let alone pleasantries. Drabble's protagonist, Frieda Haxby Palmer, a "brilliant" historian, has taken her brilliance and, more importantly, her money, and retreated to a dingy old estate in remote England, leaving her three overeducated children to discuss what to do.

"Discuss" is the operative word here, because Drabble seems incapable of launching a plot without first pondering the moral consequences of any narrative event. It takes fifty pages of attenuated conversation before the siblings can even decide to send a delegation to visit their mother, a visit dispensed with in a couple of pages, allowing Drabble to lapse back to more what-does-it-all-mean? conversations. Though past dramas are glimpsed, they never amount to anything more than a collection of glimpses; present dramas are indicated but they remain indications.

When something does happen - a cluster of violent deaths - the actual events are elided in favor of a reaction shot, not from the characters, but from the author. To wit: "The driver watches with some surprise as Nathan weaves his way toward the steps down the towpath. This is the last time anyone admits to seeing him alive. Nathan is fished out quite promptly the next morning, and the events of his last evening on earth are subjected to close scrutiny, even before it is discovered that he had suffered a mild heart attack." Yawn.

Part of what makes The Witch of Exmoor so boring is its author's obvious boredom, not just with her material, but the form of the novel itself. This is an author who seems to be stymied by self-doubt: she can't even write "alas" but must instead use "perhaps alas," and though the average reader shouldn't be expected to ask what plagues Drabble so, the question - and its answer - is more interesting than Drabble's novel suggests. By calling The Witch of Exmoor a thriller, Drabble's American publisher is attempting to ride an emerging trend in American fiction, not of literary thrillers per se, but of pseudothrillers, books that both offer up and undercut the splashy narrative machinery long associated with genre fiction and, even more, with Hollywood.

Being British, Drabble's writing is suffused with self-awareness vis-a-vis its relation to the canon. One can hear the Flaubert, the Murdoch - even, to her own detriment, the Monique Wittig. This positioning would be perfectly acceptable if Drabble knew what kind of book she wanted to write, but the best she manages is a sort of sloshing around through various genres. Drabble, like so many of her contemporaries still concerned with formal innovation, is searching for a way to rebuild narrative, and, by extension, the novel, in the wake of postmodernist decimation. That's as true here as in England, with the crucial difference that in America that rebuilding has already begun, and it's taken place not in writing schools or New York publishing houses, but in Hollywood. In fact, the Hollywood thriller is, intentionally or no, the real offspring of the postmodernist antinarrative crusade, a cinematic Athena, as it were, sprung full-grown from the head of a literary Zeus.

Not even Pynchon could create a story line so entirely beside the point as those in Face/Off, Men In Black, Conspiracy Theory, or The Game, movies in which narrative serves as nothing more than the invisible warp holding together a tapestry of movie stars, special effects, and, with any luck, big box-office sales. More and more, these movies pass off the absolute irrelevancy of their narratives with a wink to the audience that says, We both know it's not the story that counts here. Nevertheless the classic stories are there - heroic conflict, holy quests, searches for identity. But all these narratives do in their new incarnation is hold things together for about two hours, providing the small but necessary excuse for moviegoers to fork over $8.50 and watch the work of actors and special-effects technicians.

Now, literary writers have begun to incorporate similar narrative confections into their work. If that's surprising, it shouldn't be: the plot elements of a Hollywood thriller are so familiar to a contemporary audience that they can be sketched in a few scenes. More importantly, the audience knows that the plot is not as important as what it makes possible, less a stage than a playing field on which any number of games can take place. At last literary writers (Margaret Drabble, take note) can have their cake, narratively speaking, and eat it too. This year has already seen Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, a novel whose spies, assassinations, and covert arms deals could form the basis of the next Schwarzenegger movie. Terrorists, explosions, and kidnappings filled David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, whose lethally addictive "entertainment" was a movie, after all, not a book. A.M. Homes' The End of Alice could be the next Brian De Palma vehicle, Patricia Melo's book The Killer aspires to Silence of the Lambs status, whereas Richard Rayner's recent novel Murder Book is so filmic that its characters read as roles and its settings as locations.

Clearly, the relationship between the narrative techniques shared by these novels and Hollywood thrillers is not as simple as this account might suggest. Their forms are various, not monolithic; nor are they, as far as I can tell, some kind of collective experiment. In other words, I'm not declaring a new school of writing or anything like that. I'm just commenting on what seems to be an emerging trend, a trend whose finest product so far is Denis Johnson's Already Dead.

On the face of it, the book seems lifted from (or destined to become) a film noir, full of smugglers, killers, double-crossings, and botched drug deals; indeed, Johnson developed the plot from Bill Knott's "Poeme Noire" after first trying to turn it into a screenplay. But if the elements are classic noir, the way they are presented is something else entirely. In the first half of the book Johnson's narrative relies on strained coincidences. One senses that Johnson's hippies and stoners and New Age witches would prefer to get high and search their navels, but Johnson refuses to grant them peace; instead, in a showy authorial manner, he drags them into his plot. But once in, something changes: the characters lurch from passivity to action; they get caught up in the story around them, even as that story is rendered beside the point.

As the first half of the novel closes, Nelson Fairchild, after botching a $90,000 cocaine deal, finds himself being hunted by two killers hired by his onetime partner, Harry Lally. If he had access to his ailing father's money Nelson could pay Lally off, but Fairchild pere has ceded his estate to Nelson's wife, Melissa. If Nelson could hold out until his father dies, things would be fine, but again there's a hitch: Melissa's filing for divorce, and if it goes through before Nelson's father dies, she'll end up with everything. Nelson, in turn, has contracted someone to kill his wife so he can inherit her money and pay off his debt.

But in the concluding chapter to part I, Johnson flashes forward a year and a half later, informing readers that Fairchild's hired killer double-crossed him and that the bounty hunters got Fairchild in the end. When part 2 opens, then, we're back in the thick of things, with the single difference being that we know how things will turn out. What Johnson's flash-forward does is shift readers' attention from the action of the narrative to the actions of his characters - from a cinematic emphasis on story, in other words, to a moral emphasis on deeds and consequences. The move elevates the novel, lifting it from its Dirty Realist depths to Augustinian heights.

What's going on here isn't some conservative urge toward a simpler, storied time, neither a capitulation to classic narrative nor even a recasting of it, as in Angela Carter's volumes of retold fairy tales. The story that Johnson's novel and others like it are telling are mysterious, almost magical things, full of signifiers that don't point back to any signified, like road signs to a town long since destroyed by some cataclysm. The tale really is in the telling, because in the end, there's nothing there.

Dale Peck is the author of the forthcoming thriller Now It's Time to Say Goodbye.