AMERICAN FICTION: FORGETTING THE ORDINARY TRUTHS

...His stories, along with the novel Snow White, do not pretend to any ideas, comic or otherwise, about this "trash phenomenon"— the steadily mounting detritus of words and things that forms Barthelme's image of American life—but are composed of the trash itself, Pop-eyed curiosity and random spontaneity carried to an ultimate lunacy...

...Nor is her young innocent, Annie Gianfala, any ordinary waif...

...He starts out with what is there, and hopes to find out where it can take him...

...Fuchs has always been gripped by a deeply temperamental disaffection—it is strongly present in the beautiful novels of Brooklyn that he wrote as a young man, in the 1930s—but in West of the Rockies the mood becomes desperately self-enclosed, the darkness too unremittingly pertinent only to Fuchs's own sense of the hopeless fitness of things...

...Not quite eighteen when the book opens, Annie has stumbled West from New York to join a feckless would-be lover...

...sealed inside the magic barrel, he can't remember how he'd planned to get out...

...He does not start out on a quest for literary salvation, in the form of self-parody, or antihumanist values, or any fuzzy philosophical road signs leading straight to the Nature of Modern Life...

...What separates Bellow from these voyeurs of the bizzare, however, is the intellectual toughness that he brings to his portraits: the grotesque, Bellow quietly reminds us, is part of the world but not all of it...

...Yet a novel like Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show, as extravagantly sex-ridden a fantasy as anything Barth or Roth has attempted, PEARL K. BELL blasphemous and outrageous and often even nauseatingly raunchy, a noisy carnival of scattershot jokes, slapstick, howling obscenity, and truly dazzling comic energy, is given no merit badges by the critics who so eagerly pay tribute to the kind of writer John Leonard has described as "the instant genius with hair between his toes, fragments between his ears, and a gristle string of Wittgenstein beween his teeth—munching out novels about the corruption of words...

...And the hub of the wheeling dream is that assembly line of unreality, the movie industry...

...And the novelists who listen to the apocalyptic siren songs of critics like Fiedler and Poirier are swept dangerously off course...

...Sammler's Planet with the grave imperative of human obligation—the "natural knowledge" that man has a contract "to do what was required of him"—that the countercultural pacemakers have set upon him in full cry...

...It is exactly the precariousness of Annie's small victory over innocence which is established with haunting clarity at the end of the book, the dramatic telling of a difficult truth...

...Though Poirier tries with laborious tenacity to squeeze Norman Mailer—the chronic problem child of American writing—into his scheme of great fiction as a "politics of selfparody," his critical effort fails altogether to persuade one that Mailer can ever be fitted into such arbitrary patterns...

...THE MODISH CRITICS are impatient with such deceptively small and subtle statements about human experience...

...Miss Fox suggests that Annie has salvaged something from her rough youth, without becoming hard or smugly invulnerable, for either "resolution" would falsify the powerful authenticity of the author's judgment...

...As the novelist John Gardner recently put it: "Our experience of extremes...

...The sick joke of Portnoy's Complaint was somewhat redeemed by the manically outraged family portrait, but The Breast is all sick and no joke, a repellent Lenny Bruce one-liner spun out to 78 tediously smirking pages, and it comes out of the same bag of commercial slickness hiding under the sackcloth of honesty as that very nasty Jules Feiffer movie Carnal Knowledge...

...What could be more perfectly expressive of contempt for the ordering intellect, for the authority of culture, for any discriminatory AMERICAN FICTION: FORGETTING THE ORDINARY TRUTHS 27 distinction between the multitudinous and the valuable—if all men are equal, all things are also equal—than a writer whose work consists almost entirely, or so he likes to claim, of the raw sewage of spontaneous experience...

...In Poirier's recent book of essays, The Performing Self, this exuberantly liberated professor of literature dismisses the cultural legacy of all centuries before the present holy confusion as repressive "waste...

...Eudora Welty is not clairvoyant, yet when Medgar Evers was shot to death, she described his assassin with uncanny accuracy in a story written before the murderer was known to, much less apprehended by, the Mississippi police...

...Among the avowedly traditional novelists today, none can simulate a comprehensive insight and response more artfully than John Updike...

...In Malamud's case—and he is by no means the worst offender—the distortions of the symbolic dream expose an unthinking sentimentality that fatally confutes the bleak finality which the events in The Tenants enforce...

...Barth, in Giles Goat-Boy and the novellas now collected in Chimera, becomes so hopelessly tangled in his proliferating metaphorical ingenuities that in the end he seems a failed Houdini...

...Vonnegut, haunted for over two decades by the bombing of Dresden which he witnessed as a prisoner of war, seems permanently locked in the adolescentwiseguy slouch that has always been such a beguiling but improvident pose for the AllAmerican Boy Writer, with one foot on Huck Finn's raft and the other in a steaming double bed...

...disorder is now the highest good, and "writing is a form of energy not accountable to the orderings anyone makes of it and specifically not accountable to the liberal humanitarian values most readers want to find there...

...The dreck, the waste, it turns out, is not Poirier's literary heritage of the past, but its hectically celebrated opposite, the way we live now...

...At least in the United States, where a region can be larger than an entire European country, the answer to Geoffrey Grigson's recent question—whether "a literature about place, literature of any real kind in which place predominates, is any more possible...

...makes all Americans radicals...

...Our particular moment and place is located in our heads and our bodies and at the risk of solipsism we must start there and push outward...

...Even a far more interesting writer, such 30 as Bernard Malamud, in his ambitious and erratically powerful The Tenants, is infected with the current novelist's mania for expecting more from the immediate social scene than he can actually make it yield...

...Yet the air has never been more confusingly thick than it is now with modish cant about revolution and repression, illusion and reality, liberation and alienation...

...When the spectral radio announcer Dick Gibson—a herd of alters in search of an ego—takes over a talk show, it turns into uncontrollable confession, a burlesque Miss Lonelyhearts of the air, a poignant and horrifying vocal parade of the lonely, the mad, the blind...

...The cripple Einhorn, the quack psychiatrist Dr...

...Recognizing no scarcity of supply in any human department...

...Nor has Bellow come to such achievement by turning his back on the representative insanities of the contemporary wasteland, or by being any less responsive to the tragicomic prevalence of the grotesque in the world he deals with...

...Unlike Updike's fashionably middle-class dropout, Annie does not choose to become an outsider but begins as one—her mother dead in the girl's infancy, her drunken artist father too busy ruining new marriages and breaking old promises to remember her existence...

...Artur Sammler, having miraculously survived more horror under the Nazis than most men could summon up in a lifetime of bad dreams, is now ruminatively waiting for the end—of his own life certainly, and perhaps that of the planet Earth as well—on the upper West Side of New York, a lunatic cornucopia of grandiose schemers who want to colonize the moon, or get rich quick, or make a revolution...

...Interestingly, the writers born and raised in California, Like Joan Didion, do not write its best novels, perhaps because it has been peculiar to California, like the City of New York, to be a beckoning oasis for people PEARL K. BELL fleeing a seedy elsewhere, an Eldorado of the mind for American romantics and madmen...

...One important exception to this rule is Daniel Fuchs, who, after 34 years of writing almost nothing but screenplays, is an authentic insider, and last year he published the Hollywood novel that everyone had given up hope he would ever attempt...

...but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of `sense' of what is going on"—a statement as close to self-justification, if not quite selfparody, as Barthelme allows himself to go...

...It won't be the first miracle...

...In Southern California, we run out of sanity as well as continent...

...It is precisely the opposite quality of openness, the suspense a novelist can derive from AMERICAN FICTION: FORGETTING THE ORDINARY TRUTHS 33 a passionate receptivity to the varieties of human experience, that brings excitement to Paula Fox's version of California life in The Western Coast...

...Fragments are the only forms I trust," Barthelme declares in his story "See the Moon...

...What at first glance seems to be sympathetic curiosity about the human predicaments tearing Americans apart quickly reveals an aridity of feeling in the midst of stylistic plenty...

...At this moment in American fiction, when incoherence masquerades as innovation, The Western Coast makes brilliant use of a currently disreputable but traditionally honored idea of a novel's purpose—that it can deal with the treacherous passage from innocence to experience and earn the right, without sentimentality or simplification, to say in the end "Look, I have come through...

...For it points to a misunderstanding of what the novel as a form of literary art can successfully attempt to be...

...These are the unforgivable obscenities in America today...

...Part of that collapse is prefigured in Fuchs's terrifying portrait of the aging cinema goddess, Adele Hogue...

...As Joan Didion, a monotonously narrow novelist but a brilliant journalist, has written: "California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension...

...The reductio ad absurdum of spontaneity, and of the well of warm feeling and response it is supposed to tap, is Barthelme's icy inhumanity, man and his language reduced to the flotsam of discardable things, in a lunar hallucinatory Armageddon of flip-top soda cans and TV-commercial jingles...

...Indeed, it is not an absence of "sovereign images" that afflicts the American novelist, AMERICAN FICTION: FORGETTING THE ORDINARY TRUTHS but an embarrassment of abstract riches, noisily competing for the writer's assent to the single truth of one moral calculus...

...The new mutants have not managed to monopolize the world of the novel, nor does it look as though they ever will...

...In their brutal mockery of the American scene for its grossness and materialistic decadence, Fiedler declared, such books as Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Thomas Pynchon's V., and William Burroughs's Naked Lunch heralded not only the end of the "bourgeois" novel but the end of language and human history...

...Try as he will, Philip Roth's pretense to metaphoric grandeur—if I say metamorphosis I must be Kafka—does not save him from boring us to death...

...If Malamud had exercised some restraint, and let the bare bones of his story—black writer and white writer in mortal combat— stand in all their plainness, The Tenants might have been an extraordinary achievement...

...In Henry Miller's Tropics, in Mailer's An American Dream, in the countless no-holdsbarred novels of our present yearning to breathe free, the body is either vulgarized or abused, in most cases with a peculiarly unemancipated violence...

...In The Tenants, he has tried to shape his own troubled image of racial conflict in America today, and though the scene is superbly rendered—a moldering Manhattan tenement that has been emptied of every inhabitant but his principal character, a novelist named Lesser—Malamud tries to urge his lessons on the reader with too insistent a pointer...

...The intellectual's romantic dream of good will, fine manners, equality, nobility, Malamud is aching to convince us, is a sick naivete, and our crumbling civilization can no longer suppress the atavistic craving for slaughter...

...This is partly a matter of Miss Welty's grasp of regional idiom and eccentric gesture as the essence of this tribal gathering—" more and more voices, all telling it —bragging, lying, singing, pretending, pro 32 testing, swearing everything into being, swearing everything away—but telling it"— and partly the earthy love she feels for these farm folk with all the instinctive richness of a lifetime of knowing...

...When energy is all, precision seems despicable...

...What may, but probably won't, put an end to one kind of alliance in contemporary American fiction between sex and the grotesque is Philip Roth's The Breast, which misses its presumably satiric target—anybody's guess: infantile regression, men, sex— with even more depressing ineptitude than his sorry attempt at political mockery, Our Gang...

...Updike's exhaustive attention to current problems is like two solid months of the Sunday Times Magazine with the dullness thrown out, but the lapidary metaphors and technically adroit shifts of scene fail to hide his manipulative detachment from every human figure in his American sampler...

...The movie world he knows so well turns into such a mercilessly bleak equation, the weight of his attention to catastrophe and deceit becomes so oppressive, that we are left with no sense of what Edmund Wilson suggested was essential to any writer using Hollywood as his subject— "a larger picture which has its center in a larger world...

...In a curiously revealing footnote of The Performing Self, Professor Poirier quotes a letter sent out to reviewers by Saul Bellow's publisher about a printer's error that slipped into the first edition of the collected stories Mosby's Memoirs, and then sneers at such fussiness as the sure sign that Bellow is American literature's Flaubert—"the Flaubert terrified of cliché and enamored of le mot juste...

...What has yet to be mentioned emphatically enough about all the writhing bodies in "serious" American fiction today is their suffocating dullness as an object of prolonged literary scrutiny...

...But unlike Barthelme, Elkin sees the shape of a man still struggling to stay alive in the insidious American junkheap, yells his own nutty "Watch out" and seizes him before he goes under...

...Some reviewers may be quick to judge it only another Bildungsroman, but the novel is free of the cliche lockstep up the ladder of identity that the textbook term so often suggests...

...By now, however, it has become abundantly clear that these self-appointed heresiarchs of an apocalyptic future have been far less influential and novelistically persuasive than Fiedler assumed they would be...

...It is exactly the collision between movie-struck unreality and the sinister actuality of the West that has produced some of the most original fiction of this American century, from Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, published in 1939, to the recent West of the Rockies, by Daniel Fuchs, and The Western Coast, by Paula Fox...

...A full bill of demand and complaint was therefore presented by each individual...

...As the young novelist Ronald Sukenick recently wailed in Partisan Review: "Those of us who sense the absence of what Wallace Stevens called `sovereign images' for our reality can't write in the mode of social realism because it is exactly our idea of realness that is in question...

...It seems to be true, in general, of Hollywood as a subject for fiction that those who write about it are not authentic insiders and that those who know about it don't write...

...Yet the issue that remains largely unexplored is more complicated than sex or no sex: it is, whether suffocatingly detailed concentration on the details of sex can intensify or clarify the larger human experience of a novel, without moving at one extreme into the sadistic degradation of hard-core 28 pornography or, at the other, into mere sardonic buffoonery...

...Barthelme's writing consistently reduces language— and the things that language names and identifies—to a kitchen midden of dehumanized potsherds that no literary archeologist in his right mind would ever try to piece together...

...You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly...

...With its zany religious cults and hypnotically uniform climate, its swamis and Esalen Institutes, its floating population of eccentrics in exile, California is the living hyperbole of America, yet the far-out hip writers have ignored its rich accessibility for less interesting visions of their own imagining...

...In the midst of all the clamor about the corruptness of the age, the politics (sexual and otherwise) of nonconformity, the innovatory wisdom of the unintelligible, what's new (good), what's bad (old), who loses and who wins, most serious novelists go on doing the best they can, which can be either marvelous or pedestrian, with the same tools that novelists have used for over two hundred years—experience, intelligence, language, and imagination...

...In both cases they start not with what they know, but with a chimerical map of the Zeitgeist...

...This strong need to use geography as the commanding image of the title itself is a clue to the force of place in novels about California...

...Thus American self-doubts about Vietnam, race relations and ecology lead instantly to a conviction that life is unendurable, God is horror, and our wives and children all hate us...

...In the pursuit of experimental trickery, the self-styled innovators forget that, as a character in The Western Coast remarks, "Ordinary life had its ordinary powerful truths," and they are not to be had without effort...

...But she is a natural survivor, with a mysterious will to remain intact and move on, because she has the tenacity and the courage to learn...

...It is AMERICAN FICTION: FORGETTING THE ORDINARY TRUTHS 31 in part because Bellow chose to end Mr...

...Though the Gothic novel of the South died with Faulkner and Carson McCullers—such slick imitations as James Dickey's Deliverance are more sensationalistic than Southern— the greatest of living Southern writers, Eudora Welty, now free of the shadow Faulkner cast on much of her earlier work, moves in her sixties from strength to strength...

...Yet Losing Battles is by no means only an elegiac celebration of vanished rural innocence...

...A passionate embrace of extremes has been endemic to American writing from Melville to Mailer...

...He is a perversely dedicated student of the contemporary junkheap, and his tincanand-broken-bottle collages attempt a frontal assault on language that seems extraordinarily attuned to the kind of radical sensibility that strains against the "repression" of words as it gropes for "consciousness," nonverbal sensitivities, and the psychedelic innocence of the full-blown mind...

...Even more to the point, does the number of orgies and blow-jobs a writer crowds into three or four hundred pages tell us any more about the quality of human freedom in our time than a Master and Johnson dossier...

...Everything and everyone in West of the Rockies seems hounded, hard, delirious with the imminent disaster that money alone can prevent or make happen...

...In the long run what makes Barthelme interesting is not his literary merit—without a tremendous revving up of duty and will, I find him unreadable—but the way in which his extreme submission to one aspect of the counter-cultural temper leads to its very opposite...

...Indeed, not only Mr...

...Donald Barthelme exemplifies Poirier's conception of this modem literature to per fection, because to begin with he obviously regards himself as a comic writer (though I have yet to find a line of his work genuinely funny...

...A crucial part of that current contempt for the past, and the idealization of "freedom of expression," is the extraordinary public exposure of sex—not, one is assured, in the nasty interest of prurience, but in the cause of sex as a radical act...

...Where's the action in America now, at this culturally critical moment—and the bright novelist is at the ready with the first moon landing, an embittered blue-collar Middle American, a confused middle-class teenage dropout, an enraged black, the Vietnam war, sexual promiscuity, drugs, and even automation in the printing industry...

...But a few writers of substance pay no attention to this lust for metaphoric danger or to the suicidal contempt for the past, for they know that what matters to a novelist is at once less inflated and more severely challenging than the rhetoric of the apocalypse can comprehend...

...Death hovers like an uninvited guest at the edge of the day, and not all the ghosts are made welcome, yet Losing Battles is abundant in broad Southern comedy...

...They prefer the meretricious melodrama of generalization— that the past is dead, the present a dolce vita of important confusion, the future a probable nightmare...

...Our normal view is that if everything isn't terrific, it stinks...

...A novelist begins not with definitions of reality and authenticity, or an abstract adversary posture about the sterility of naturalism or realism, but with what he knows—about himself and more than himself...

...To this futile end he will stretch, inPEARL K. BELL Hate, invent, and pad his details to fit the pretentious reach of that design, but inevitably the fabric of his novel, like any fragile substance strained beyond its breaking point, ends up full of holes...

...Lest we miss the symbolic resonances of his white and black antagonists, Malamud tacks on a long and befuddling fantasy about Africa, in a misjudgment all too familiar in American novels today...

...Though Fiedler's extremist fiction has failed to materialize as triumphantly as he foresaw, many of the distorting obsessions of the mutant temper are encountered in a wide range of novels that seem to meet the demands of still another critic, Richard Poirier, who bends himself as approvingly to the present climate as Fiedler did to the portents of 1965...

...But it is precisely the incoherence of solipsism that such a novelist welcomes—his use of the word risk is either slyly disingenuous or inexplicably naive...

...For one thing, Mailer seems to have abandoned the writing of novels for the less accountable turgidities of confessional journalism, and for another, his singularly quirky guilt and self-rationalizing turmoil are much too painfully serious to leave any room for that playfulness in literature which, according to Poirier's touchstone of the higher modernity, "makes fun of itself as it goes along...

...But this novel is fraudulent in a special way, not least in its cunning topicality...

...Stanley Elkin is not a sexual or verbal nihilist but a brilliantly profane wit, impudent and sometimes barbaric because his comic exuberance is literally irrepressible, who in The Dick Gibson Show uses the history of radio in America for an original commentary on American life...

...Only that very perceptive writer of mysteries, Ross Macdonald, has made any serious attempt to deal with the hysteria and violence that keep erupting into the surface of California life...

...Since his early stories about East European immigrants in The Magic Barrel, Malamud has moved steadily away from this private heartland, and the distant fields have not always proved greener to his touch...

...Non-negotiable...

...In Losing Battles, her recent masterpiece about Mississippi country people in the 1930s, she allows the past to yield its lessons for the present without resorting to the dull belligerence of most black writing today, and without the creaking mythical sonorities that blurred Malamud's vision of race in America...

...Like Nathanael West and Daniel Fuchs, Paula Fox has a rich and witty memory of the verdant aimlessness of Southern California— her period is the 1940s, though one California decade seems remarkably like another—but her feeling for people is more generous than West's and less bleakly predictable than Fuchs's...

...What Edmund Wilson wrote about Los Angeles in 1940 is, at least for novelists, essentially unchanged: "In this city that swarms with writers, none yet has really mustered the gumption to lay bare the heart and bowels of the moving-picture business...

...Even the sometime humanist William Gass has complained: "That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really...

...Sex is of course an enormously important area of private freedom, but the verbal power of sex, in great literary art like Ulysses and Moll Flanders, either transcends the body or mocks it...

...is decidedly yes...

...Hollywood has haunted every writer lured by its money and celebrity, but not even Fitzgerald succeeded in capturing its bizarre haphazardness...

...It has been said of Updike over and again that he has nothing to say and says it exquisitely, and his recent Rabbit Redux offers no fresh ground for disagreement...

...This is not to say that the rural crackers of Losing Battles are anything like Faulkner's reptilian Snopeses, for some of them have a pastoral nobility that is closer to Lena Grove in Light in August...

...In Elkin's hands radio, that cacophony of voices and static, becomes a shudderingly funny blueprint of American popular culture, and the way the mass media distort and eventually obliterate the distinction between public voices and private souls...

...Yet what will probably be remembered of American writing in the 1960s and '70s, long after Barthelme and Pynchon have been declared passe, is being written by novelists who care more for people than their garbage, and for words—precise and suggestive—more than dreck...

...Using the supernatural fantasy and future-gazing of science fiction, the new mutants would depict "the post-humanist, post-male, post-white, post-heroic . . . post-Jewish world...

...Sammler's Planet is one of the few contemporary books that engage the mind and heart as one reads...

...William Burroughs writes of a similar nausea with words in The Job, in which he invents a machine that will discard "the old verbal garbage" and achieve "the baptism of silence...

...It is as though the imaginative perspective of a writer, in the act of transforming and reconstructing his actuality, can no longer be trusted to reveal anything Iarge enough about the wilderness of human experience...

...In place of those once separate spheres of fictional influence labeled the Southern novel, the homosexual novel, the Jewish novel, the woman's novel—and such colonial subdivisions as the Williamsburg novel, the Mississippi novel, the Hollywood novel— what would now dominate the scene, sweeping in on the easy ride of youthful insurgency, would be novels envisioning the nightmare before us...

...And in Mr...

...Sammler is alert to every nuance of their demented audacity, and though he can scarcely admire this distasteful world, he can understand it all, and even bring himself to forgive its self-destructive excesses...

...You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination . . . whether the worst enemies of civilization might not prove to be its petted intellectuals who attacked it at its weakest moments—attacked it in the name of proletarian revolution, in the name of reason, and in the name of irrationality, in the name of visceral depth, in the name of sex, in the name of perfect instantaneous freedom...

...And for a time Fiedler's prophecy did indeed seem dismayingly close to the truth, as Heller and Bur roughs and Pynchon were joined in the critical limelight by such celebrants of unreason, chaos, and inexorable decay as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Donald Barthelme, and a horde of mini-Jeremiahs crying havoc on the Western world...

...This unrelenting yet loving wholeness of her gaze sets Eudora Welty apart from the more tendentious writers of the American South like Walker Percy and William Styron...

...Where else but in California can we find, as the ordinariness of daily life, precisely that dislocated, crack-brained world of the postbourgeois future that Vonnegut and Barth have struggled to concoct in their sci-fi inventions, or Burroughs in his drug-induced hallucinations...

...Yet the fact that a writer chooses to work in a conventional naturalistic mode is no guarantee that he will be free of apocalyptic infection...

...Saul Bellow's Artur Sammler comes much closer to defining what is really at stake when he wonders, looking incredulously at New York in the late 1960s, whether civilization is about to collapse...

...As though his derisive portrayal of the student radicals at Columbia, jeering at Sammler's lecture on English rationalists, weren't bad enough, he insists on such mots justes as duty and obligation...

...in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent...

...In Miss Welty's novel, the huge Vaughan clan has gathered for its annual reunion on a parched summer Sunday...

...The rooted sense of place, then, can still be crucial to an American novelist's imaginative energy, and some admirable novels have recently come from that most eccentric of American regions, the state of California...

...Saul Bellow is still, as he has been for almost 20 years, the most inventive, intelligent, and genuinely surprising novelist in America, and Mr...

...in George Steiner's ironic words, "eros as the last and decisive frontier of political emancipation...

...Yet for all the battering power of Fuchs's story, it finally seems to bog down in its own despair...

...In our hysterical devotion to the carpe diem present, it is easy to lose sight of a persistent and living strength of American fiction, regionalism, with its nourishing sense of both place and history as unique human forms of continuity and order...

...Instead the novelist is exhorted—or exhorts himself—to summon up a grandly nihilistic or symbolic design before he sets a word on paper...

...And he does this without surrendering his grasp of moral necessity...

...Miss Welty judges her knownothings with unfaltering clarity, and through them she can subtly point to a later Southern world in which the Southern attachment to its "nigger-hating" ignorance turned ugly and malevolent...

...West of the Rockies is a short, tense story of that Hollywood period "when television was comparatively new and the big picture studios still throbbed, the collapse yet to come...

...Tamkin, the shady millionaire Mintouchian, Moses Elkanah Herzog pouring his heart out in unmailed letters to famous men, Sammler's crazy daughter Shula, her junkcrammed shopping bags dangling like untreated tumors from her fingers—Bellow has as quick and mordant an eye for all this as any of Fiedler's hotshots of the apocalypse...

...Pynchon's V., read with a jaded eye in 1972, almost a decade after its publication, seems a capricious victory of violent and indiscriminate matter over mind, which is one definition of madness...

...The Breast is a rank novella about a man who turns into a six-foot-long female breast with an even longer memory of sexual conquest...

...But the lure of mythification is over• oweringly strong for all sorts of American novelists these days, and not even Malamud had the confidence to resist it...

...Her ignorance of the world and its ways, her lonely vulnerability to chance and malice, seem to mark her for an early doom...

...Sammler's Planet there appears a quality not always prominent in Bellow's earlier and more self-consciously metaphysical work, his highly sophisticated but nonetheless deeply affecting compassion...

...While the trendy professors intone their dirge over the corpse of the past, the creature refuses to die...

...Yet novelists in America, one should remember, have for many years been granted considerably more license in the portrayal of sexual behavior than playwrights, or movie and magazine writers, and by now the outermost limits of daring have become so commonplace in fiction that the truly innovatory novel is the one without any sex whatsoever...

...In Fuchs's taut, nervously rapid prose, we feel the noose of failure tightening around her neck...

...In a country that builds obsolescence into its automobiles, movie stars, and protest movements, the same calculated mortality appears in its literary fiction and in the boldly plausible generalizations of its critics...

...Though the cultural syndrome descried by Fiedler has certainly not vanished, neither has the traditional realistic novel whose material draws its strength from the memory, experience, and human ordinariness of its readers...

...Thus the dream sequence of The Tenants ends with black lion and white lamb joined in wedded peace by a rabbi who says, at the end of the ceremony, "Someday God will bring together Ishmael and Israel to live as one people...

...Sammler's Planet but most of Bellow's fic tion, going back 30 years to Dangling Man, has drawn much of its dramatic power from the misshapen and the misbegotten...

...Yet the antirational, anti-intellectual mood which Fiedler so shrewdly diagnosed is still a formidably pervasive current of American culture, and the rejection of the past that grows out of such a mood goes hand in hand with prophecy of a hallucinatory future...

...A mere seven years ago Leslie Fiedler, with his characteristic blend of hyperbole and Zeitgeist, announced the birth of a new breed of American novelist, "the new mutants," whose subject was nothing less than the end of man...

...It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber...

...At the end of five often bruising years in Los Angeles, Annie has acquired some resilient defenses, and no longer relies blindly on the reflexes of the born victim...

...In a world that has become intoxicated with the power of comprehensive explanations that in fact explain nothing, many traditionally gifted novelists have become so tainted by the need to demonstrate how perceptively they comprehend the enigmatic forces that struggle to dominate the contemporary scene that they fall into as destructive a trap as the experimental writers happily gargling their litanies inside "our heads and our bodies...

...The seven dwarves of Snow White have a pedantic liking for "books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant...

...But the beginnings of a later horror are there in the 1930s, and Miss Welty does not flinch from the ugly fruit they will come to yield...