Marrying lyrical close reading with critical awareness, Novel Style argues for the ethical value of elaborate styles of writing and demonstrates that artistic excessiveness can provide dynamic responses to the moral complexities of our times. The work of Angela Carter, Martin Amis, and other stylists of excess, has become difficult to read in recent years, as our capacity to account for the effects of literary style has weakened. To respond to these stylists -- to respond to style -- requires us now to invent a new critical vocabulary, and to forge a new kind of critical voice. Ben Masters, in Novel Style, has achieved both of these things. He has a striking critical voice that is as revealing as it is original, and his work offers a new way of understanding the ethical power of style. This book will become a necessary reference point for any discussion of literary fiction in the modern and contemporary period.