The state of American fiction: All in the family:
Yardley, Jonathan
LIVELY, HEALTHY & CONSEQUENTIAL The state of American...
...movements...
...The revival of interest in the family-and the But there are others, some of which seem to have found concomitant revival of more traditional modes of almost no readership at all, that treat family matters with 11 May 1979: 265 sensitivity, imagination and skill...
...As his admirers terminants, of moral values, and a severe autobiographical have pointed out, a recurrent experience in the reading of truthfulness...
...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...
...His precursors are Swift, Rabelais, BurtonPERSONAL RELATIONS writers of the books Frye calls "anatomies...
...Cheever, with the commercial success of your novels to bring Yet the evidence is there...
...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...
...but unless you are a that my infatuation with it has clouded my critical judgment...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...To a Irving and Welty-have been widely read and discussed and remarkable degree, furthermore, these writers are preoccupied can profit from no further discussion here...
...The sociologists trotted out statistics about argued that the novel is a bit too long for its own good, the rising divorce rate and the declining birth rate...
...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...
...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...
...Personal relations" means everything that Pynchon is the discovery that what you thought was his fancy, Commonweal: 266...
...number of scenes of absolutely withering power...
...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...
...His strength lies precisely in his handling of public themes...
...Yet these common except the seriousness of their work have turned their stories-almost all of which deal with the ties that bind, even if attentions to family situations...
...the Woiwode's errors are those of ambition and expansiveness novelists-at least a great many of those taken seriously in rather than caution and timidity...
...There are many things he would like to do, (Houghton, Mifflin...
...in fact he forces the reader to, in a himself with contemporary angst and anomie...
...handle...
...Taylor and Woiwode are necessary...
...prose that is deliberately as bleak as its subject...
...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...
...Gravity's Rainbow begins with the sentence, "A MARTIN GREEN screaming came across the sky," and that motif recurs throughout the book...
...I decline to do so...
...notably the threat of AND PUBLIC THEMES modern war...
...This is not the first time in recent months that I have A good case can be made that Taylor is the greatest living mounted this particular soapbox, and I concede the possibility American writer of the short story...
...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...
...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...
...ity...
...approach it from many and sometimes sharply divergent an- As for Beyond the Bedroom Wall, it is an unabashedly gles...
...He is not afraid of emotion literary circles-threw aside the family and concentrated on (the same can be said of Irving) and he is not afraid to insist that the individual, usually the brooding individual flagellating the reader feel it with him...
...ogy...
...Pynchon, on the other hand, is not a traditional novelist in that sense...
...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...
...From John Cheever to David Plante, readers to your stories, you are fated these days to a small from Eudora Welty to Robert Kotlowitz, from John Irving to readership indeed...
...In Great Tradition novels, of other countries beside can grasp and check to give authority to the horror-fantasy...
...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...
...Price's The Surface of Earth (Avon), Bernard Malamud's He seems, as we watch him, able to do anything...
...But there is enough one novel...
...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...
...David Galloway's A Family Album (Harcourt, Brace & and subject-matter...
...The family being an institution painfully-are simply unmatched for subtlety, resonance, of infinite possibilities, it isn't surprising that these writers wisdom and sheer elegance of prose...
...what is surprising is that they approach it at all...
...The most that can safely and accurately be said is that a large number of writers, working JONATHAN YARDLEY quite independently of each other, have arrived at the same place...
...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...
...Writers of all World According to Garp (Dutton/Robbins), Taylor's Colages, stations, slants and styles are bringing forth novels and lected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Welty's Losing short stories in startling profusion -and this is work of quality Battles (Random House) and Woiwode'sBeyond the Bedroom and serious purpose, over and above the commercial fiction Wall (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Three of these-the Cheever, with which the marketplace has always been littered...
...For what To say that in the last few years there has been a conscious, little it is worth, Woiwode's novel and Taylor's stories are the organized reaction against the inwardness and self-absorption two American works of fiction of the past decade that I'd take of '60s fiction would be preposterous...
...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...
...They form or another...
...LIVELY, HEALTHY & CONSEQUENTIAL The state of American fiction storytelling-defies any explanation, or at least any that I've ALL IN THE FAMILY been able to come up with...
...That has been Taylor's fate, one comThomas Savage, from Larry McMurtry to Larry Woiwode, pounded by the hostility and incomprehension with which from John Updike to Toni Morrison, from Peter Taylor to Northern reviewers have greeted his tales of upper-middleMaria Katzenbach-writers who otherwise have little in class domestic life in Memphis and Nashville...
...Though it can be family was dead...
...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...
...old-fashioned novel that appeared (in 1975) just before critics That's because from the early '60s well into the '70s our were beginning to have second thoughts about the avantsociologists and our novelists were trying to tell us that the garde, and thus was widely misunderstood...
...AT NO TIME in the fifteen years I've been reviewing books From their labors we have received five books of lasting professionally has American fiction been as healthy, value and importance: Cheever'sStories (Knopf), Irving's The lively and consequential as it is right now...
...promise a lot more yet...
...writers don't work in with me to the proverbial desert island...
...But a few words on with variations upon a single theme: familial and domestic life...
...Special mention should be made of David Plante's pond to that subject-matter...
...middle-aged woman who fnds,the family she never knew she Roth writes wonderfully well within that sphere of interest had...
...And his values corresalbums...
Vol. 106 • May 1979 • No. 9
