LITERARY CRITICISM: KEVIN POWERreviews The Good of the NovelEdited by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan Faber & Faber, 225pp. £12.99

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a welcome move away from the kind of heavily theoretical, philosophy-inflected literary criticism that prevailed (particularly in the universities) during the last three decades of the 20th century. The various critical methodologies that made up “literary theory” have come to seem badly dated. A diffusely felt but nonetheless definite hunger is abroad for a more old-fashioned, humanistic, idiosyncratic kind of criticism, a criticism that carries no burdensome cargo of ideological doctrine, that engages with questions about form, language and style without getting caught up in a spiderweb of jargon about the male gaze, or late capitalism, or gender as performance. A criticism, in other words, that approaches works of fiction as works of fiction rather than as mere textual artefacts in need of dissection.

In their introduction to The Good of the NovelLiam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan express this hunger: "We are emerging from a period of heavily theoretical criticism," they write, "and as a result, what might be called the novelness of novels is coming back into focus."

McIlvanney and Ryan stress the evaluative nature of this new critical project: the new humanist critics are interested, as the theorists never were, in trying to figure out what it is that makes good books good and bad books bad. (Some people might wonder why criticism stopped doing this in the first place; my only guess is that it must have looked like a good idea back in the 1970s.)

The Good of the Novelassembles 13 newly commissioned essays that investigate the "novelness" of 13 recent novels, and although a certain unevenness of quality is inevitable in any anthology, the general standard of the criticism in The Good of the Novelis invigoratingly high.

The New Yorkercritic James Wood, the poster boy for the new humanist criticism, leads the charge, with a typically nuanced, slightly fussy reading of Ian McEwan's Atonement. (All of Wood's criticism is fussy. In fact one of the defining qualities of the new humanist criticism is its fussy attentiveness to the minutiae of sentences, syntax, even individual word choices.) "McEwan superbly pulls off that very hardest of tasks, the simultaneous creation of a reality that satisfies as a reality while signalling that it is itself a fiction," Wood writes, and proceeds to catalogue McEwan's metafictional strategies with pointillist precision.

Andrew O'Hagan, author of Be Near Me, offers a lyrical, impeccably written pair of reflections on two novels by Don DeLillo, Underworldand Falling Man, and attempts to understand why the earlier book is better than the later. Of Falling Man, DeLillo's 9/11 novel, O'Hagan observes: "None of us who lived through the morning of 11 September 2001 could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist . . . would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread." Which skewers the novel's chief aesthetic failing in a single sentence – the essence of good criticism.

Jason Cowley proposes a devastatingly precise critique of the career of Martin Amis through the lens of Amis's 1995 novel The Information: "There is no love in [Amis's] fiction, certainly for or between characters. There is only a love of style, something that precedes and is anterior to the fiction." Which certainly shouldn't put you off The Information, which I think succeeds as an inspired comedy because of what Cowley calls its "failure[s] of imaginative empathy" rather than in spite of them.

Robert MacFarlane's essay on Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning The Line of Beautyis a model of new humanistic criticism. MacFarlane starts with the prose, noting Hollinghurst's virtuoso deployment of the free indirect style (and when a contemporary critic uses the words "free indirect style" you know you're dealing with a new humanist: Wood has practically patented the phrase). MacFarlane then appraises Hollinghurst's ambivalent handling of the conflict – central to the Jamesian tradition from which The Line of Beautyderives – between the ethical and the aesthetic.

Tessa Hadley meditates on eros and reality in JM Coetzee's Disgrace; Amit Chaudhuri does a brave job of getting past the fulsome prose of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things; Frances Wilson rehearses the controversy that attended Hanif Kureishi's novel about the end of a marriage, Intimacy; Mary Hawthorne reads Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lacwith a chill clarity that would not embarrass Brookner herself; and Benjamin Markovits comes up with a wonderful description of Colm Tóibín's prose style in The Master: "Children tell stories by saying, this and then this and then this; [Tóibín's] novels are enormously complicated versions of their technique." That is both funny and true; it tells us something about Tóibín's methods that we might not have worked out for ourselves, and that is exactly what literary criticism is for.

Some of the essays collected here are better than others, of course: Ray Ryan's reading of John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sunis superb, for example, while Ian Sansom's piece on Philip Roth's American Pastoralis disappointingly vague and unengaged. You could complain, too, that the editors and their writers have chosen safely popular novels; part of the critic's job, after all, is to introduce readers to books they might not have noticed on their own. But, by and large, The Good of the Novelis an instructive, entertaining and reassuring book: reassuring because it reminds us that real criticism was not dead, only sleeping, and that it is once again beginning to wake up.

Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock(Pocket Books). He teaches creative writing at University College Dublin