Between the best-sellers and the groves:
Green, Martin
sensitivity, imagination and skill. Thomas Savage's I Heard bears on identity, in its social as well as its individual dimenMy Sister Call My Name (Little, Brown) is the story of...
...England, the investigation of personal relations goes with the It is not after all Pynchon's fault that we have to grasp investigation of class relations, of social and intellectual de- contemporary history in horror-fantasy terms...
...Tolkien's renewed popularity appears to contradict this, but Their weaknesses are complementary, too, Pynchon, for here one senses more a nostalgia for collegiate memories, for instance, does not convince me, fictionally...
...Roth remains that the imaginative experience is in this way limited...
...prose that is deliberately as bleak as its subject...
...spair...
...many truths he would like to tell, many subjects he would like They are novels about death, estrangement, self-discovery, to treat, which because he is a traditional novelist he cannot betrayal, divorce, loyalty, rivalry, infidelity-you name it...
...Though I have languid spring days on campus grass under oak trees, than for read Gravity's Rainbow through more than once, deeply im- reading pleasure...
...No lingering over linguistic niceties here...
...middle-aged woman who fnds,the family she never knew she Roth writes wonderfully well within that sphere of interest had...
...THERE ARE at least three avenues for approaching a disPynchon, like Mailer, took writing courses rather than literary cussion of contemporary fiction and, though their destiones, and majored in science...
...turning cycles of self-punishment...
...tion of everything outside his "personal relations" to the This sense of extension corresponds to the sense of retreat we status of "material for fiction...
...But after one has applauded this grace, the fact limitations of the traditional novel by jumping into satire...
...For me-a I could hire him to be my lawyer"-returning to the obsessive conservative in literature if not in politics-it is enough to say problems of his relations with his ex-wife...
...In Great Tradition novels, of other countries beside can grasp and check to give authority to the horror-fantasy...
...Their audiences tend to be middlebrow in Roth's case, BETWEEN THE GROVES highbrow in Pynchon's...
...Pynchon, on the other hand, is not a traditional novelist in that sense...
...I disguised as realism, a hybrid of scanty invention and evicould never relax the pressure of my will upon my imagina- dently sweaty research...
...tried a similar escape in The Great American Novel...
...This is exactly right that our best writers are now writing about the best and most not only for his character but also about personal relations...
...to deal with science and technology imaginatively have been in non-fiction...
...David Galloway's A Family Album (Harcourt, Brace & and subject-matter...
...Gravity's Rainbow begins with the sentence, "A MARTIN GREEN screaming came across the sky," and that motif recurs throughout the book...
...In The Professor of Desire supermarket for the mind...
...Occasiongry, exaggerated, self-falsifying gestures at times...
...In great fiction character to Pynchon's imagination...
...His novels bridge the gap between the two culturesRoth is our contemporary master of the fiction of personal which means that the general reader is conscious much of the relations, if we let that phrase stand for (as I think in literature it time of the gulf beneath him, of how much he doesn't undermust stand for) all the traditional subject matter of the serious stand and can't imaginatively grasp...
...Roth is always inviting us The Boardwalk (Knopf), Morrison's Song of Solomon (New to consider the use he has made of these writers, and even the American Library), William Humphrey's The Ordways ways he is like and unlike them...
...Special mention should be made of David Plante's pond to that subject-matter...
...A visitor from Mars might among editors and educators and staving off intellectual dewell decide that all their books were written by the same man...
...Pyn- But still we have two beautiful talents, producing really chon's affinities are with Barth and Mailer...
...The measure of Pynchon's achievement is that he has find that the two poles are represented by Philip Roth captured and appropriated that element of modem experiand Thomas Pynchon...
...Every person and event is we always catch astonishing glimpses of ourselves...
...This fictional gaps and crudities...
...a recognizable rogues gallery of those bitten by the traditional novel's skills than he has...
...In this conceived in those terms, and using the conventions of carica- popular fiction, like autograph hounds, we catch glimpses of ture rather than those of portrait can only temporarily disguise others instead: historical personages in the Wouk-Michener those limitations...
...It is nephews are politically active) and in that failure matches quite impossible for me to say how much pleasure I take in exactly the curve of the book's approach to such responsibilthis...
...Personal relations" means everything that Pynchon is the discovery that what you thought was his fancy, Commonweal: 266 wild exaggerations of his imagination, is documented fact...
...This gives them an extra range...
...In Roth's case the weakness is the lack of scope, the reduc- The opposite avenue of approach wends its way through the I / May 1979: 267...
...At first dictment...
...Thomas Savage's I Heard bears on identity, in its social as well as its individual dimenMy Sister Call My Name (Little, Brown) is the story of a sions...
...Of course Roth can use this They are then opposites in various ways...
...But they are all novels about families, and for the most part In My Life As A Man, for instance, the hero goes with his they are novels about families struggling to stay together in one brother and nephews to hear Martin Luther King speak...
...promise a lot more yet...
...he not only knows what among contemporary writers are with Bellow and Updike...
...just horrifying...
...like the willful absence of the kind of fiction is an uncloseted roman a clef, who's for the author, like the unpleasant Slothrop (the hero of Gravity's hammock historian or the trivia expert...
...As his admirers terminants, of moral values, and a severe autobiographical have pointed out, a recurrent experience in the reading of truthfulness...
...The intensities of meaning are get in reading Roth...
...Or a public utility or an airline...
...ogy...
...One avenue is that of the Best Seller list...
...To put it more objectively, I'm always aware of too Rosemary Rogers, Sidney Sheldon and Leon Uris...
...But there is enough one novel...
...However, the bulk of these offerings year in and year out They are both very obscene...
...invitations that harmonize (Knopf), Richard Stem's Other Men's Daughters (Pocket beautifully with his quite different attempts to conjure up his Books), Philip O'Connor's Stealing Home (Knopf), Reynolds own fictive illusion in our minds...
...Herman Wouk has the formula...
...so too tion, because it never took fire and began to run in rhythm with does James Michener and, a considerable step below them, so Pynchon's...
...his critics will say but can build that criticism into his self(Updike's last novel seems to be an attempt to escape the scrutiny...
...notably the threat of AND PUBLIC THEMES modern war...
...in both the ground shifts under the reader's all personal, and to reach them we must follow him in inwardfeet...
...What he knows is literature-plus the striking ways real life is different-and the ways he knows it is literary...
...he offers a lot more to expli- AND THE BEST-SELLERS cate, of course...
...His precursors are Swift, Rabelais, BurtonPERSONAL RELATIONS writers of the books Frye calls "anatomies...
...Most of these fictional offerings are disguised "How to" books (including our soft-core pornography) in that instruction and accumulation of knowledge about people and things and not the feeling for people and things are paramount...
...like most writers today, they feel are not what the British would call a "good read" but are driven to explore new areas of sexual experience, and their something distinctively American...
...In Roth's case this disgust returns upon himself, the facts, Ma'am, something useful, storable, tradeable, a because he is always self-oriented...
...the hero involuntarily profanes his idol Kafka by an obscene Akin to this pragmatic impulse is an American resistance to fantasy...
...Roth's affinities weakness too as a source of meaning...
...Read Mario Puzo and Arthur Hailey...
...And they are strikingly different, And if Roth can talk about literature in ways new to the almost complementary and mutually exclusive, in their traditional novel, Pynchon can talk about science and technolachievements...
...nations are different, in a curious way these avenues do but their recoil from literature burdens their writing with an- converge...
...Americans seem to prefer their fantasies pressed, I have never felt each page justify itself as I read...
...and yet he Dubin's Lives (Farrar, Straus), Robert Roper's On Spider is, as he reminds us, hemmed in by the limitations of "perCreek (Simon and Schuster), Paul Theroux's Picture Palace sonal relations...
...Immediately it refers to the V2 rockets of World War II, but ultimately, for the reader, to more modem WHEN I TRY to draw a map of modem American fiction, I bombs...
...There are many things he would like to do, (Houghton, Mifflin...
...Price's The Surface of Earth (Avon), Bernard Malamud's He seems, as we watch him, able to do anything...
...Mailer's attempts impressive novels, and we should be grateful for that...
...They form or another...
...Related to this is Roth's English literature GEORGE W. HUNT provenance...
...There is, I believe, an MLA group devoted to explicating Pynchon...
...His strength lies precisely in his handling of public themes...
...What Melville called Rainbow) who demands a sympathetic identification he does the "shock of recognition" that great fiction offers is transnot deserve, and like the Ivy League fraternity-intellectual posed into the "satisfaction of recognition...
...ally, excellent novels do grace this list, prompting good cheer Of course they are also similar...
...The term "escape literaangst drives them also to make that experience disgusting and ture" is also a misnomer, for it appears that our capitalist hearts beat even in an easy chair or a hammock...
...How does Las Vegas operate...
...They are the two novelists who, ences, has built a fictional structure that can contain and though still young, have achieved something remarkable, and employ our panic...
...There may be a moral, or at least a conclu- are all deeply impressed, but on the way back he says "Maybe sion, to be drawn from that...
...In Pynchon's case, the disgust is a generalized in- the imaginative world of fantasy in its purest sense...
...But basic of subjects, and that they are doing so in forms and styles it is also shameful in its irresponsibility (his brother and that are accessible and appealing to the general reader...
...bitch goddess Success in the Rogers-Sheldon offerings...
...I decline to do so...
...values of compassion, understandThe Family, which describes the gradual dissolution of a ing, ironic acceptance, despite the assertive and aggressive Providence working-class family in spare, monochromatic surface of his central characters...
...What is to my mind most innovative about his modification The list-making could go on for a long time: Updike's of this tradition is his self-exploring acknowledgement of his Couples (Knopf), McMurtry's Terms of Endearment (Simon predecessors, in the form of critical comments on and allusions . and Schuster), Katzenbach's The Grab (Morrow), Kotlowitz' to writers like Chekhov and Kafka...
...In other words, Pynchon needs more of the pageants...
...And his values corresalbums...
...not only devising plots and situations that Jovanovich) employs highly experimental photographic reveal new aspects, but in his every sentence refining upon his techniques to recreate a family's history through its snapshot identity by the modulations of his tone...
...handle...
Vol. 106 • May 1979 • No. 9
