Diminishing Fictions
Bawer, Bruce
I rving Howe recently complained in 1 the New Republic that literary criticism in America has become so professionalized that it no longer bothers to address the intelligent common reader. Its...
...The trouble is that this literary conceit all too easily devolves into a mannered cliche...
...Bawer demonstrates by quoting eight passages from as many contemporary writers...
...Bawer is also disturbed by younger writers such as Meg Wolitzer, David Leavitt, and Susan Minot, who have embraced a sort of literary minimalism...
...Such writers, Bawer concludes, have shirked their "obligation to create, to order, and thereby to serve not merely personal and superficial truths but universal ones...
...Reprieving the creature from execution by pen point, he continues, "no one can know how glad I am to find/On any sheet the least display of mind...
...Implicit in Bawer's criticism is the classicist's insistence that while fiction should have the freedom to roam where it will, it shouldn't abandon its original mission entirely...
...Taking a fresh sounding on this staple of American letters, he reveals how Fitzgerald wove references to music into his narrative that seem at first no more than incidental but prove on closer inspection to have been carefully deployed to deepen the novel's thematic resonance...
...There's no genuine attempt to bring the larger world into focus...
...The problem, Bawer concludes, is that "the set decorations—the bags of groceries, the copies of GQ and People and Vogue, the BMWs and MTV and Sound of Music cast albums—tend . . . to overwhelm the frail narratives...
...As those who follow his film column in this publication know, he writes for Howe's intelligent common reader and does so with an uncommon disregard for fashion...
...Next Month: BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS DIMINISHING FICTIONS: ESSAYS ON THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL AND ITS CRITICS Bruce Bawer/Graywolf Press (St...
...To prove his case, Bawer quotes Professor Frederick R. Karl's ruminations in American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation...
...Its practitioners now join university English departments where they write for one another in a vocabulary that seems expressly designed to bar the laity from the circle of initiates...
...Unlike many commentators, Bawer remains unimpressed by writers such as John Barth, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes, who have been perpetrating something called metafiction...
...18.50 George McCartney 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989...
...Karl hails William Gaddis's novel JR as an "inaccessible triumph," a book so "obsessive . . . that the reader is forgotten" and left to struggle for "some thread of argument" that might give it coherence...
...In each a fashionably illustrated T-shirt does the work of characterization...
...Typically, their stories take place against the tacky clutter of America's popular culture...
...That there's so little evidence of mind on today's published page is the burden of Bawer's timely observations...
...Readers of Alex Heard's "Literary Brat Pack II" in last month's issue may not have known that the term is a Bawer original...
...He moons over Hawkes's "resistance to clarity" as though unintelligibility were art's sine qua non...
...Their work is a stillborn imitation of the modernist masters, galvanized into a sort of Frankensteinian life-in-death existence by professors on the prowl for difficult texts to justify their role as interpreters...
...He might well have concluded with another...
...Fiction, and literature more generally, Bawer argues, has become a diminished thing in today's America...
...Bawer relates a revealing anecdote on this score...
...John's University...
...It seems the literary brat packers were out for a drive in Long Island's fashionable Hamptons a few summers ago when Meg Wolitzer wondered out loud, without benefit of irony, "what it might mean to the future of American fiction if they crashed...
...Bawer begins his book with a quote from Robert Frost...
...Bawer concedes, correctly I think, that when Carver and Beattie first began using this strategy, it was often quite effective...
...Bawer is a critic who abhors the gnostic mentality...
...They exist not to be enjoyed but decoded...
...They've formed a school following the lead of Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie, which Bawer dubs the "literary brat pack...
...They're content, as Bawer puts it, to render life as "a teleological puzzle," shrugging their shoulders at the futility of it all...
...Plainly with an intelligence I dealt," he reports...
...Giles Goatboy and Gravity's Rainbow are books designed for the classroom...
...In "A Considerable Speck," Frost presents us with a writer who decides not to squash a mite he's just noticed scurrying across the page upon which he's been composing...
...Metafiction, he explains, "has less todo with making sense of the world . . . than with glossological gameplaying...
...Armies of the Night may have been entertaining then, but who reads it now...
...D espairing of their trade's significance, novelists such as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow have attempted to invest their works with relevance by grafting fact to fancy, creating that curious hybrid, the nonfiction novel...
...Fortunately, there are exceptions to Howe's sour generalization, Bruce Bawer being one of the more refreshing...
...Despite their diversity, each in its way addresses the theme announced in the book's epigraph taken from Robert Frost's poem, "The Oven Bird": "The question . . . is what to make of a diminished thing...
...They bring their enormous talents to bear on ephemeral matters not to discover how they relate to permanent human issues but merely to celebrate themselves...
...rr he writers Bawer admires—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Peter Taylor, Wendell Berry, Tom Wolfe—are those who have struggled with varying degrees of success to do the business of fiction—to rescue the particular instance from its apparent futility, finding in it the revelation of a larger pattern of human experience and aspiration...
...In Diminishing Fictions: Essays on the Modern American Novel and its Critics, Bawer has collected twenty-nine of his recent reviews and essays...
...We hunger for narratives because they mold the amorphous, aimless stuff of our immediate experience, giving us a glimpse of an intelligible pattern beneath the surface confusion of our lives...
...As for Doctorow's tendentious reworking of the Rosenberg spy case, The Book of Daniel, you'd have to be a heartless ideologue not to laugh while turning its pages...
...A man in one story wears a T-shirt emblazoned with "an anatomical drawing of a heart, the separate chambers carefully labeled," another wears one displaying a New York City subway map, a third uses his chest to announce that "The Only Safe Fast Breeder is a Rabbit," and so on...
...From its Latin root, fiction means to shape, to mold...
...At least that's what narratives did until our eerily sophisticated century...
...As such, it appeals to self-important pedants...
...Now fashionable writers think it naive to suggest there is any pattern to experience whatsoever...
...He believes criticism has social consequences that make it too important to be placed beyond the reach of the general audience...
...Bawer admires the craft of Salinger and Roth, but finds their narcissistic self-explorations claustrophobic...
...As a result, they're turning out diminishing fictions...
...Bawer correctly blames this situation on the "postwar academic institutionalization of literature...
...Admission is granted only to those who agree to write in the pack's approved mode, an "aggressively flat, affectless, detail happy manner...
...But in doing so, Bawer finds they've only succeeded in producing instant period pieces and self-destructing travesties...
...All too many "serious" authors have retreated from fiction's classic offices into its various antechambers: non-fiction novels, self-exploration, metafiction, and minimalism...
...He shows how it's done by a master in a fine essay on The Great Gatsby...
...The danger, however, is that such membership frequently encourages a peculiarly sorry mix of mindless self-importance and banal groupthink...
...Paul, MN)/331 pp...
...While other critics approach their task armed with the latest theories and ideologies, Bawer checks his preconceptions and politics at the door, the better to judge the work before him on its aesthetic merits alone...
...Who would disagree...
...George McCartney, the author of Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, teaches at St...
...This has given rise to a species of fiction in which "the prime criterion of excellence . . . seems to be a sort of mindless, impersonal monotonousness...
...It's true that artistic movements can provide security and support for fledgling writers and, as Bawer points out, it's especially comforting to belong to a mutual-admiration society whose members have publishing access to the New York Times Book Review...
...This is the kind of academic, Bawer observes, who "confuses pretentiousness with profundity" and takes it as axiomatic that the importance of a literary work is in direct proportion to its ability to "puzzle the bejesus" out of us...
...Their patented accumulation of seemingly irrelevant detail vividly renders the chaotic, lost lives led by people so lacking in personal force and cultural roots that their possessions display more vitality than they do...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
