Personal relations and public themes:
Hunt, George W.
wild exaggerations of his imagination, is documented fact. tion of everything outside his "personal relations" to the This sense of extension corresponds to the sense of retreat we ...
...in fact, these late 1970s might is evident is that a new kind of criticism with a different possibly be its numerically richest and most versatile era...
...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...
...Read Mario Puzo and Arthur Hailey...
...the innocent American Adam had bitten the apple of discord...
...view, and of William Gass's The World equally so to both...
...alienation from America's old image of itself, and they did so MARTEN GREEN teaches in the English Department of Tufts University by pointing up the sheer craziness of life, the cracked mirror of in Massachusetts...
...The distinguish whether the post-modern critics discovered their American novel, a fabulous invalid like Broadway, now apdarlings or the darlings submitted to their beguilements...
...one can only hope to be anti-fiction...
...The national mood of Traditional "realistic" devices such as plot, character and the 1960s and early 1970s reflected our faltering liberal and causal continuity stood exposed either through obvious parody historical hopes: both the old and the New Frontiers were or through the explicit renouncement of these conventions...
...In a preoccupations of the post-modernists, refers to a novelist's distinctively modern fashion our recent better novels mark a concern with facticity, with the rhetoric and reality of social return to that precarious path trod by Melville and Hawthorne, change, with moral and spiritual questions-in short, with Twain and James, and later by Hemingway, Faulkner and what Henry James called "felt life...
...In The Professor of Desire supermarket for the mind...
...But after one has applauded this grace, the fact limitations of the traditional novel by jumping into satire...
...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...
...Borrowing freely from European for- plex...
...Beginning in the early 1960s, ter) on Healer (once again) were, despite flashes of brilliance, writers and critics of fiction began to despair of the realistic sophomoric exercises, airless, and as heavy in irony as that possibilities of the novel, of its potential engagement with goose's liver...
...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...
...to deal with science and technology imaginatively have been in non-fiction...
...Pyn- But still we have two beautiful talents, producing really chon's affinities are with Barth and Mailer...
...Roth remains that the imaginative experience is in this way limited...
...vocabulary and perspective and a new kind of fiction became What has happened...
...So our late 1970s novelists are not optimistic but they with the writing...
...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...
...This turn outward, how- Fitzgerald...
...Wilfrid Sheed, Ann Tyler, John Irving, Peter Yates, John Like the chicken and the egg, it is difficult in retrospect to Gardner-have also contributed outstanding fiction...
...anti-fiction revisited JANET GROTH fiction...
...No matter what it is called, the meaning of the Rosenbergs and Heller's Good As Gold (Simon & Schus"post-modernism" is clear...
...bitch goddess Success in the Rogers-Sheldon offerings...
...As Kierkegaard once said, elicit a respect and reverence not accorded non-academically "Irony is an abnormal growth...
...True, each of these novelists has produced at least doubt about whether these blessed would inherit the new one exceptionally fine work (Barth several), but then again, so literary earth...
...That grid goes by rites has published any fiction of consequence in several years...
...Since 1975 each of our finest provided a window on reality and reached the deepest of life contemporaries-in this pantheon I place Bellow, Updike, experiences...
...The news on the homefront was grim indeed and and, most recently, The Challenge of the Mahatmas...
...To put it more objectively, I'm always aware of too Rosemary Rogers, Sidney Sheldon and Leon Uris...
...The opportunity of hearfiction began to turn inward and to evince teacher of English at the University of ing first-hand from several anti-fiction an ever-greater consciousness that the Cincinnati, are now in print...
...Every person and event is we always catch astonishing glimpses of ourselves...
...Occasiongry, exaggerated, self-falsifying gestures at times...
...of facile cynicisms as of pollyannaisms...
...closed...
...the reader's legitimate instincts for realism and pragmatism are scorned...
...ally, excellent novels do grace this list, prompting good cheer Of course they are also similar...
...Locke's phrase, in contradistinction to the parochial Sellers and the Groves, is a peculiarly American tradition...
...THE DEBATE SHIFTS TO THE MORAL QUESTION Fiction vs...
...What emerged afflicts large portions of the reading pubthat the character-a stony-hearted was a demonstration that, whatever its lic...
...Of course Roth can use this They are then opposites in various ways...
...Here the answers are many and comacademically popular...
...he not only knows what among contemporary writers are with Bellow and Updike...
...just horrifying...
...Dickens, for example, once modified by a discussion between two major prac- als, there is still a burden of misuna character in one of his serially- titioners of the anti-fiction novel: John derstanding about its nature which published works when word reached him Barth and John Hawkes...
...fiction anyway," even the news and even the bearer...
...What pears disconcertingly robust...
...like the abnormally enlarged affiliated writers...
...This gives them an extra range...
...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...
...Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme...
...Except for Barthelme, none of these academic favoto the reigning critical ideological grid...
...Or a public utility or an airline...
...What is the nature of fiction/anti- Within the Word, which argues a self- If we look at fiction as John Gardner JANETOROTHformerly on the editorial staff of contained fictional world, the lines of does-and as most of the great novelists The New Yorker, is presently a member of the this no-longer-new debate became re- of the 19th century did-as a representaEnglish Department at the University of Cin- drawn and took on new life...
...What, if any, is its moral con- the discussion, charging the writers of tent...
...Roth's affinities weakness too as a source of meaning...
...About twenty years tion is the author's position on those heart of hearts cannot get past its often ago, with the advent of Pynchon and questions...
...Unlike much of the continental European have turned outward once again and no longer refrain from tradition with its emphasis on ideology, the middle avenue reporting what Richard Locke has dubbed "the secular between the demanlls of Realism and Art, between the Best news...
...Herman Wouk has the formula...
...Many pay the anti-fiction novel lip midget- was causing pain and distress to explicit content, a significant shaping service, may purchase-and even a real midget, resident in the Midlands, factor in virtually all contemporary fic- read-an anti-fiction work, but in their and much beloved...
...asking questions of a formal and epistewolog:..al and ture, a period of assimilation and review, and the bright books technical kind about fiction...
...spair...
...he offers a lot more to expli- AND THE BEST-SELLERS cate, of course...
...Tha: few literate In the early 1970s when these post-modem authors were at Americans have heard of some of these names, much less read the height of their popularity (especially their less gifted contheir fiction, is, one suspects, also part of their charm for freres like Vonnegut and Brautigan), John Leonard expressed academics...
...a recognizable rogues gallery of those bitten by the traditional novel's skills than he has...
...Why, tion of Nabokov, there is something febrile about their prothen, this darling status, that of one sequestered and overly duce, a parodistic element that turns the book back on its ravished in the ivory tower...
...Americans seem to prefer their fantasies pressed, I have never felt each page justify itself as I read...
...Mailer's attempts impressive novels, and we should be grateful for that...
...In Pynchon's case, the disgust is a generalized in- the imaginative world of fantasy in its purest sense...
...university workshops, and so their pronouncements on fiction I find this assessment prophetic...
...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...
...Those a notch below- Walker Percy, Toni Morrison, came to the forefront of attention...
...introduced the element of morality into with it is properly a moral one...
...One reason (as Gore Vidal has author and consumes him, an irony so hyper-developed it pointed out) is that most of them are teachers themselves or run becomes a form of suicide...
...may prove similarly enlightening here...
...The ironic stance is still in the fictional tioned created deliberately self-conscious novels, novels that forefront but it is of a gentler, more mature kind, as suspicious flaunted their artificiality and emphasized their fictiveness...
...and our dreams of inevitable progress were exposed as CONTRIBUTORS dreams...
...How does Las Vegas operate...
...small wonder, then, that many novelists, messengers of bad FATHER GEORGE W. HUNT, SJ., is on sabbatical leave from LeMoyne news, steeled themselves for execution by asserting "all is College in Syracuse, New York...
...One avenue is that of the Best Seller list...
...Gardner tion of the real world, then our concern cinnati...
...In Roth's case this disgust returns upon himself, the facts, Ma'am, something useful, storable, tradeable, a because he is always self-oriented...
...historical and moral and social questions-so characteristic of Is there, then, a third avenue, somewhere between the the modernist novel-and, instead, turned inward to investi- Groves and the Best Sellers...
...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...
...various names: Post-Modernism, Meta-fiction, Surfiction, The recent efforts of Coover's The Public Burning (Viking) on Fabulation...
...The modernist D. H. Lawrence had found right under our noses, in the better novels published in called the novel "the bright book of life," implying that it the last three or four years...
...Post-modern novelists were especially adept at JONATHAN YARDLEY is book editor of The Washington Star and dramatizing this despair and that of the sensitive American's author of Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner...
...However, the bulk of these offerings year in and year out They are both very obscene...
...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...
...In turn, the novelists we men- of life reflect this...
...No lingering over linguistic niceties here...
...This fictional gaps and crudities...
...It is at once about Africa, about America, nor is it counterfeit journalism...
...I disguised as realism, a hybrid of scanty invention and evicould never relax the pressure of my will upon my imagina- dently sweaty research...
...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...
...In great fiction character to Pynchon's imagination...
...Related to this is Roth's English literature GEORGE W. HUNT provenance...
...The intensities of meaning are get in reading Roth...
...tried a similar escape in The Great American Novel...
...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 Groves of Academe and into the library...
...There is, I believe, an MLA group devoted to explicating Pynchon...
...and we readers were alerted that all Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, stories are arbitrary and made up...
...who the reigning academic darlings of American fiction are: the text itself was suspect...
...nations are different, in a curious way these avenues do but their recoil from literature burdens their writing with an- converge...
...Here the American The canons of fictional "truth," i.e...
...Their audiences tend to be middlebrow in Roth's case, BETWEEN THE GROVES highbrow in Pynchon's...
...His books include City Lights, Children of the Sun human hopes...
...We look 11 May 1979: 269...
...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...
...What he knows is literature-plus the striking ways real life is different-and the ways he knows it is literary...
...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...
...Our contemporary novelists about the art of fiction-making...
...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...
...and, best of all, it is about the continue to tap all the post-modernist resources like parody, human heart in conflict with itself...
...do-out of a consciousness that, dowment for the Arts) brought Gass and The matter seems worth reviewing though their medium may be artificial, Gardner together to debate the matter, an here because, in spite of a considerable they are dealing with the material of real- event that was followed a few days later vogue for anti-fiction among intellectuity...
...And he made the observation: "With the exceptoo have a good number of contemporary novelists...
...liver of the Strausbourg goose it ends by killing the indiBut the more telling reason is that their works conform best vidual...
...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...
...If you do not believe any of this, then read John ever, is not a return to an outdated nineteenth century realism Updike's The Coup...
...The Gass- writers who spoke about the philosophithing they were producing was a product Gardner debate appeared in The New Re- cal and ethical bases of their work reof the imagination: an object made of public, March 10, the Barth-Hawkes lieved that burden for many who attended words...
...For one thing, after the upheavals of Vietnam and malist and structuralist models as did these writers, critics Watergate, another change is taking place in American culbegan...
...Commonweal: 268 Our national crisis of confidence is not over, of course...
...the hero involuntarily profanes his idol Kafka by an obscene Akin to this pragmatic impulse is an American resistance to fantasy...
...Last October, a Fiction Festival anti-fiction with a want of moral M OST OF our familiar novelists held at the University of Cincinnati (in seriousness-a proposition Gass firmly have operated-and many still joint sponsorship with the National En- rejects...
...I suggest there is and that it is gate fiction qua fiction...
...myth, the absurd, comedy, multiple narrative perspectives and instead, it is moving into a new and, perhaps, more precarious so on, but they are also engaged with the world and not just phase...
...in both the ground shifts under the reader's all personal, and to reach them we must follow him in inwardfeet...
...In other words, Pynchon needs more of the pageants...
...At first dictment...
...Such Lawrentian optimism was now called into Cheever and Malamud-has published an excellent novel, one question and, for the post-modernist, the fact the bright book that is rich and resourceful and reflects a new departure in their was itself artificial and an imaginative construct of "life" work...
...turning cycles of self-punishment...
...Transcripts of both discus- repellent content and textual difficulty to Borges, among others, some writers of sions, edited by Thomas LeClair, a actually like it...
...the traditional processes of reading and With the publication last year of John To state the two views in the briefest writing fiction that the productions of the Gardner's On Moral Fiction, which ar- way possible will necessarily be crude modern school came to be identified as gues the superiority of the traditional and inadequate...
...Even a expectations regarding the narration's reliability, were now cursory investigation of our better academic journals reveals exploited in reverse: narrators revealed they were not reliable...
...The new insistence upon viewing comments in The New York Times Book the festival, A resume of their positions the novel as artifact proved so inimical to Review, April 1, 1979...
Vol. 106 • May 1979 • No. 9
