The Shadows of the Avant-Garde: Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh and the Crisis of Modernist Total
by Luke Whitaker
Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh(upcoming from Deep Vellum, August 2025) seems presents itself as something of a paradox: an effulgence of linguistic experimentation, the penultimate experience of Western Literature and a harrowing meditation on historical loss, a work of hermetic density that simultaneously articulates an ethics of expression. Situated within the shifting, perhaps stagnant and plateaued grounds of contemporary literature, it stands as a formidable challenge to the reigning paradigms of literary production. If Schattenfroh operates within the lineage of modernist textual excess—recalling figures such as Joyce and Pynchon, Musil and Mann, Arno Schmidt and Peter Weiss all alike—it does so with an acute awareness of what Max Lawton, in his interview, identifies as the contemporary sloppish, or rather commercial papish crisis in contemporary fiction. The work resists not merely the commodification of narrative, but the very notion that narrative itself can be a stable vessel for historical reckoning.
The Labyrinthine Architecture of Schattenfroh
Lentz’s novel is a constructivist endeavor, a textual edifice erected through recursivity, digressions, layered allusions, syntactic ruptures, altered forms, etc. The Untranslated’s review aptly describes the novel as a Gesamtkunstwerk of language itself, positing it alongside the towering untranslatables of the past century. But if Schattenfroh is an encyclopedic and maximalist novel, it is one at war with its own encyclopedism. Its linguistic play does not affirm a Borgesian infinitude but rather testifies to the failure of language to contain the traumatic substratum beneath. This failure is not incidental; it is the very subject of the text…
Matthias Friedrich, the novel’s editor, underscores this point in his interview, emphasizing that Lentz does not seek a grand unifying structure, but rather a multiplicity of schisms. Here, Schattenfroh departs from the encyclopedic impulse of its predecessors, refusing to stabilize meaning even at the level of aesthetic totality. It is in this disavowal that the novel emerges as a critical force, undermining the formal ideologies of modernism while simultaneously extending its project into new terrains.
Against Perceived Brodernism: Literature After the Totalizing Impulse
One of the more contested interpretations of Schattenfroh has been its relation to what has been termed “Brodernism,” in Federico Perelmuter’s already infamous op-ed Against High Brodernism from Los Angeles Review of Books, which was somewhat concerning Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s recent english publication by New Directions, Herscht 06679, translated by Ottilie Mulzet; haphazardly defined as a a loosely described, shallow meathead “Lit-bro” aesthetic movement that positions itself as a reinvigoration of modernist excess and innovation. Albeit, there is quite a concern for the contemporary fetishization of translation, wherein readers, reviewers, critics, and the translators themselves in awe of the immensity and complexity of a work get lost amongst this and lose sight of the real merit or imagination of the text though it should be said that in contemporary literary spaces, translation has become the oasis for what Max Lawton calls the intrepid reader; the reader who is wholly disillusioned with contemporary, simplistic, unimaginitive, entirely commodified and commercialized fiction.
The real issue I perceive in the article with the list of works delved into though (given that it seems to contradict its own framing), is particularly that it seems like criticism of an *almost* imaginary person. Yes, these traits of "brodernism" exist, but also many of the people he seems to be targeting are simply engaging with art in a different way, with a different view of politics in art, than he, and that just bugs him.
The Brodernist projected manifesto, articulated in various theoretical provocations that are all but a thinly veiled axe-to-grind against a certain corner of Twitter(clearly his antagonism is directed to about five or so people on the app, chiefly Max Lawton, Andrei of the Untranslatedn and members of Deep Vellum), asserts that literature must reclaim a rigorous aesthetic ambition against the flattening effects of postmodern relativism. While Lentz’s project might seem to align with this rage-baiting position, its internal fractures resist such a co-option.
Lawton’s analysis is instructive here: while he recognizes the novel’s engagement with a maximalist aesthetic, he argues that its destabilization of syntax and voice ultimately resists the ideological thrust of Brodernism. Schattenfroh does not return to modernist ambition as a nostalgic project; rather, it exposes the very impossibility of such a return. If Brodernism seeks to reclaim totality, Lentz demonstrates that totality has always been an illusion.
Moreover, Friedrich points out that the novel is deeply embedded in the materiality of contemporary history–it does not retreat into the aesthetic as a self-sufficient domain but insists on the entanglement of linguistic form and historical rupture. In this sense, Schattenfroh performs what the defined Brodernism can’t in enacting the decomposition of grand narratives without relinquishing the force of literary invention.
The Ethics of Opacity
There remains the question of readability; whether Schattenfroh’s linguistic density, heft, and merit constitutes an ethical stance or an aesthetic indulgence. Having read the Arc pdf of it, I can safely say that the “indulgence” is entirely justified, warranted, and demanded for a text of such immensity. The Untranslated suggests that its very opacity functions as a critique of transparency culture, a refusal of the easily assimilable. This position, while compelling, does not fully account for the novel’s moments of rupture, where opacity does not merely resist interpretation but actively forecloses it. The ethical stakes of this strategy are not unambiguous: at what point does the rejection of accessibility risk replicating the elitist hierarchies it seeks to dismantle?
Yet, as Lawton contends, Schattenfroh does not simply luxuriate in difficulty; rather, it deploys difficulty as a means of dislocating the reader, forcing an engagement that is necessarily incomplete. Friedrich, too, points to the novel’s playfulness, its moments of sonic and semantic excess that refuse the solemnity of mere difficulty. If there is an ethics to Schattenfroh, interspersed between the flagellations it inflicts on the reader, it is one of provocation rather than prescription.
Conclusion: The Future of the Maximalist Novel in the flatlands of contemporary literature…
Where does Schattenfroh leave us? It is neither a revival of modernist grandeur nor a nihilistic embrace of fragmentation, but something far more volatile: a text that stages the impossibility of both positions. In resisting the recuperative gestures of Brodernism while also refusing the exhausted gestures of postmodern irony, Lentz articulates a third path, one that demands not only formal innovation but an interrogation of what form itself can accomplish.
As The Untranslated, Lawton, and Friedrich all suggest in different ways, Schattenfroh forces us to confront the limits of literature’s capacity to hold history, language, and meaning together. And it is in that confrontation that the novel finds its unsettling, necessary power.