One Doug Nufer (see review here) is simply not enough: America needs to read and produce more Oulipian fiction. Even popular fiction benefits when there are brave astronauts far out on the fringes of literature. Without experimental writers testing what language can and cannot do, mainstream literature has no fountain of new ideas to replenish all the hoary old concepts that need retiring.
Do you think there would be a Dave Eggers, for example, without French author Georges Perec to lead the way? Even authors who color outside the prescribed lines of fiction need someone to show them how, and Eggers’s experiments with format and content did not erupt fully formed from his brow. Perec’s A Void, a novel written without using the letter “e,” is often mocked as an example of overindulgence wrapped in a thin concept, but without A Void, Perec never would have written his sprawling, ambitious Life: A User’s Manual, which employs Oulipian techniques to great, touching effect.
Two recent Perec reissues, The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, are variations on the same experiment. Boss delves deep into the brain of an employee who wants to ask for a raise. It’s a heavily recursive run-on sentence of a book that tries as hard as it can to mimic the baseline processes in our brains. Sample fragment: “you go to see mr x it’s one or t’other either mr x is at his desk or mr x is not at his desk if mr x is at his desk it will be quite straightforward but obviously mr x is not at his desk so all you can do is stand in the corridor waiting for him to come in…”
While Boss revels in sameness, Place is a desperate quest for novelty, in which Perec sits at one street corner for three days and tries to document everything documentable about the place and people: “Gestures and movements are made difficult by the rain (carrying a cake-box, pulling a wheeled shopping bag, walking while holding a child by the hand).” Both books are tiny tributes to mundanity, and they inspire the reader to look at everything as a launchpad into intellectual adventure.
It’s important for literary adventurers to remember that there is a dark side to this experimentation. French author Edouard Levé was 17 when Perec died, but he carries a Perecian inventiveness in his work. His novel most recently translated to English, Suicide, is written to a friend—real or imagined, Levé never indicates—who committed suicide years ago. It cuts at a reader’s heart with its blunt truths: “Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor,” he writes, asking, “Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? I’ve never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life’s story starting at the beginning.” The experiment that Levé tries here is a cruel one that irreversibly transforms every single word of the book for every reader when they learn about it: A few days after Levé turned in the manuscript for Suicide in 2008, he killed himself. 
Purely going on the first couple of paragraphs, ignoring the actual meat of the story, I have to say this: in my opinion Oulipo is a great way for authors to shirk actual creative effort, instead replacing it with formalism that avoids putting a role on an author beyond that of a modified machine. Perhaps this is a worst case scenario, but a movement that bases itself on the idea that authors really don’t matter because of the structuralist permutations supposedly underlying literature? It seems to me to be a doctrine of defeat rather than creativity.
@1 You couldn’t read the whole article before commenting? Constraints might be in order here. And I disagree with your premise that “creative effort” is something that happens in some realm outside of forms or constraints. Writing is always constraint-driven — that’s simply what language is — and no author benefits from shirking the conversations with form, history, and all of the limits of language. Oulipians are just a little more talkative and deliberate about that engagement.