IN THE MAGAZINES

...I would guess he favors some form of participatory democracy based on local control, but it's hard to be sure...

...Brown believes that this sort of fiction, which she calls "minimalist," is a reaction to the "unequivocally biased narrative voice" of the fiction and "new journalism" of the 1960s...

...Given the choice between this and the old labels, I'll take the old labels...

...The idea of a "left" has outlived its historical time and needs to be decently buried, along with the false conservatism that merely clothes an older liberal tradition in conservative rhetoric...

...In its modesty, humaneness, and clarity, this seems a beautiful letter...

...In such a case it does not seem to matter too much if its defeat will be caused by outside intervention or an internal development which negates all the Revolution's ideals and which, with the so-called aim of "saving the Revolution," gradually sets up a bureaucratic dictatorship, a new system of repression and manipulation with empty slogans and full jails...

...A vital conservatism would have to oppose capitalism and the restless consumerist ethic it generates...

...One has to wonder whether these writers aren't making much ado about nothing...

...Percent Distribution of Families by Income 1973 1984 Change Below $20,000 32.1 36.4 +4.3 $20,000-50,000 53.0 47.9 -5.1 Above $50,000 14.9 15.6 +0.8 The decline in real income for many American families in the last decade is especially disturbing in light of the growth of two-earner families during the same period...

...Lasch seems to be calling for a political outlook that would combine the best elements of conservative and leftist thought...

...Changes in family size, the age distribution of family heads, the mix of family types have all been 'cited as reasons for the decline of the middle class...

...These two documents suggest that something new may be happening...

...That a young novelist should be possessed by such wildly inflated selfregard is understandable—it goes with the territory— but that the Times should solemnly report on it says something sad about our literary culture today...

...Bradbury concludes: "The ultimate sources of the decline in the middle class apparently are not demographic changes...

...Arguing that "the nature of the Nicaraguan regime is not the issue," the signers protest the war on Nicaragua as a violation of "the right of every nation to self-determination in complete freedom from superpower control, whether that domination is justified by the Brezhnev doctrine in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, or by Reagan's claims of U.S...

...This issue carries two documents of interest...

...The only exception is families in which the head is 65 years or older...

...We protested against American support for the military attacks on your Revolution because we consider that U.S...

...But they go on to express their disquiet about the imposition of a state of emergency last year...

...male head, no spouse present), or by the age of family head—the percent of families in each group with middle-class incomes declined between 1973 and 1984...

...I don't know if Daniel Ortega ever answered this letter or if the signatories have changed their minds about the Nicaraguan revolution, one way or the other...

...Most of those leaving the middle class slid down...

...To treat these writers as a school seems premature, to say the least...

...But to attack the new writers seems beside the point...

...If this argument seems simplistic it is worth remembering that Nobel Prizes in economics have been won for less...

...We should let them grow...

...The answer, of course, is that there would cease to be such a thing as American fiction if two such titans died before their time...

...Lasch seems so sour about both left and right that one wonders why he bothers to identify himself with one or the other: he could have written this piece for a conservative journal, since so many of the values he praises are defended primarily by the right...

...Critics have pointed out that the baby boom generation won't disappear as it gets older and that if their large numbers depressed wages when they were younger they will continue to do so when they are older...

...The Sandinistas fail to condemn the Soviet war against Afghanistan...

...Thanks to this important work we can now focus our attention where it should have been all along—on the changing industrial mix of jobs in the U.S...

...Available from 33 Harrison Ave., Boston, Mass...

...But in recent years, a troubling strain of dogmatism and abruptness has crept into his work...

...While more people in each family are working, the family is worse off than before...

...but where does it get us...

...Luxemburg went so far as to suggest that if the revolution could not survive while preserving democratic liberties, it might be preferable for it to be defeated, and live on as an inspiring memory, rather than to survive as a sordid reality...

...The recent declaration of a state of emergency, as a result of which numerous personal liberties and rights, including the right to strike, have been abolished or curtailed, cannot be justified in our view solely in terms of the military incursion by antiSandinista units...

...For some who cling to the belief that all is well in America, the problem is not economics but demographics...

...policy on Nicaragua is detrimental to the cause of human emancipation...

...To lift some lines from Ezra Pound's poem about Walt Whitman: You long ago broke the new wood...

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...Bradbury presents a more fundamental criticism of demographic argument...

...As the table shows, the fraction of middle-class families declined between 1973 and 1984 by over 5 percent...

...B. M. Two documents from Peace and Democracy News, Sunner/Fall 1986...

...economy and the regressive spending and tax policies of the Reagan Administration...

...The New Republic, October 13, 1986...

...To treat these writers as major voices or to go after them with heavy rhetorical artillery: both approaches are rash...

...Opposed to both superpowers, it seeks to bring about friendly relations between the Western left and the democratic and socialist opposition groups in the Soviet Union and its client states...

...Lasch argues that the values of tradition, family, and personal responsibility find their defenders today among conservatives, not among the left...

...And sure enough, in his closing paragraph he says: The hope of a new politics...

...Across the East-West divide, opponents of what William Cobbett called "the Thing" are finally beginning to talk to each other—beginning to realize that their struggle is the same...

...Katharine Bradbury: "The Shrinking Middle Class...

...An influential editor, Lish has acted as a oneman propaganda army for the new fiction...

...This article adds to the evidence that the American middle class is declining, and makes a powerful case that the problem is not "self-correcting...

...At first glance, Bikerts seems to lay the blame on one man: Gordon Lish...

...One of the saddest, screwiest things about this screwed-up world is our habit of believing that the enemy of our enemy is our friend...

...His attacks on the "cosmopolitan sophisticates" of the left give you a feeling of dkja vu—it's almost like reading an old speech of Spiro Agnew's...

...This sounds dandy and is quite fashionable these days...

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...Two views of the "new fiction...

...But American conservatism has a fatal flaw: it fails to see that it is not some liberal "new class" but capitalism itself that "undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and . . . is destructive of family life...

...But in the case of the younger writers, it might be wise to wait a decade or two before drawing up accounts...

...Bikerts makes a similar observation: "What has passed into fiction, whether from Carver, Beattie, or the spirit of the time, is a total refusal of any vision of larger social connection...

...Bradbury demonstrates that "the fraction of families with middle-class incomes declined within virtually all demographic groups, however defined...

...They make plain their opposition to Reagan's war and their support for "the courageous people of Nicaragua...

...Peace and Democracy News, in existence for two years, is a small newsletter that advocates a politics of the "third way...

...It bears an uncanny similarity to a letter that Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Lenin after the Russian Revolution, urging him not to suppress dissent...

...the samizdat publisher Laszlo Rajk and the novelist Gyorgy Konrad, both of Hungary...

...Shying away from unruliness, daring, and a wide social canvas, the new writers give us a fiction of cautious indirection and restricted settings...

...Available from the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, 5100 Leona St., Oakland, Calif...

...B.M...

...lies in rejecting conventional political categories and redefining the terms of political debate...

...and twelve signers from Czechoslovakia, including eight former or current Charter 77 members...

...And it is out of our feelings of solidarity [that] we wish to express our grave concern over developments in Nicaragua in the field of human rights and regarding the future of democracy in your country...

...but he's silent about the question of what kind of social arrangements could fulfill his political vision...

...The left, which until recently has regarded itself as the voice of the "forgotten man," has lost the common touch...

...Available from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West, PO Box 1640, Cathedral Station, N.Y., N.Y...

...But alongside them is an impressive list of unusual suspects: writers and activists from the USSR and its client states: among them, Jan Jozef Lipski of Poland, one of the founders of KOR...

...Conservatism owes its growing strength to its unembarrassed defense of patriotism, ambition, competition, and common sense, long ridiculed by cosmopolitan sophisticates...

...While these analysts do not dispute that the middle class has declined, they believe the problem is self-correcting, and that social policy is not needed to address it...

...By this definition about one-half of all families are middle class, about one-third have lower incomes, and the remainder, roughly 15 percent, have higher incomes...

...New England Economic Review, September/ October 1986...

...But now that we feel that this cause is being seriously jeopardized from within, it is to you that we address our sincere concern...

...The letter is eloquent, so I'll quote from it at length: The fight for human dignity and freedom, the fight for social justice and the fight for equal rights of peoples and nations, are one and the same struggle: the emancipatory battles in Eastern Europe and Latin America are part and parcel alike of that struggle...

...The most popular demographic argument is that baby boomers flooded the labor market during the last decade, expanding the supply of labor and thereby reducing wages...

...The second document is an open letter to Daniel Ortega from ten Czech intellectuals, nine of whom 111 also signed the statement on Nicaragua...

...Lasch is one of the best social critics we have: he's original, and he is one of the few people around who are trying to think their way beyond traditional political categories...

...Ellis's book might be called "minimalist," but only because it isn't saying much...

...The new fiction, at this point, may be less a school of writing than a creation of shrewd p.r...

...The New York Times reported recently that when twenty-seven-year-old Meg Wolitzer (Hidden Pictures) and twenty-five-year-old Leavitt were driving around the Hamptons together, Wolitzer began to muse about what it would mean to the future of American fiction if they died in a crash...

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...it's only natural that a later generation should rediscover the virtues of reserve...

...This piece could just as well have been titled "What's Wrong with the Left...

...The interesting question is what they'll manage to do with this style—as Hemingway has shown, and, in our own time, Raymond Carver, a lot can be done with it...

...Does the whining monotone of Brett Easton Ellis (Less than Zero) really have much in common with the witty romanticism of Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) or the precious sensitivity of David Leavitt (Family Dancing...

...female head, no spouse present...

...The counterrevolutionary onslaught will either be defeated by the free supporters of the Revolution or the Revolution will perish...

...But on rereading the essay one sees that Lish is just a convenient peg for Bikerts to hang more general observations on...

...It is true that recent American fiction has been marked by a new note of spareness and, perhaps, "affectlessness" (a key word in discussions of this kind...

...Against Hemingway's cult of reticence, people like Mailer and Bellow asserted themselves with styles of lush complexity...

...But this is to wander from the point...

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...It's hard to see how the others deserve that label...

...The old labels have no meaning anymore...

...Lasch should begin to explore the subtleties in his argument, the problems...

...Using data from the Bureau of the Census, Ms...

...What E. P Thompson has called "détente from below" may finally be coming about...

...The point is that this letter, and the statement discussed above, are two of the most hopeful documents to appear in a long while...

...Available from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, Mass...

...BRIAN MORTON Rosellen Brown: "The Emperor's New Fiction...

...As the babyboom generation reaches prime earning age, and as fewer young workers enter the labor force, overall wages will improve, thus increasing the ranks of the middle class...

...In The Minimal Self, his most recent book, Lasch offers a new way to look at American politics: he suggests that it's a quarrel among the "party of the ego," the "party of the superego," and the "party of Narcissus...

...many Solidarity intellectuals can't see anything wrong with the war on Nicaragua...

...special interests in Central America and the Caribbean...

...Each generation has to make its way out of the shadow of the one that preceded it...

...What Lasch dislikes is clear enough, but he never does more than gesture towards the improvements he has in mind...

...wife in labor force or wife not in labor force...

...No matter how we look at families—by size, by region, by type (married couple...

...Among the signers are the usual suspects— Michael Harrington, Noam Chomsky, Mary Kaldor, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass...

...Boston Review, August 1986...

...Sven Bikerts: "The School of Lish...

...The first is a statement that appeared as an advertisement last year in the New York Times and several other newspapers and magazines: "Independent Voices, East and West, Speak Out Against Reagan's Nicaragua Policy...

...He owes it to us, and to himself, to be more clear...

...Bradbury defines middle class as family income between $20,000 and $49,999...

...I myself believe that, though the criticisms made by the Czech intellectuals are just, what is even now remarkable about Nicaragua is that some important avenues of dissent remain open there, despite the enormous pressures of war...

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...It is because conservatives have managed to occupy so much of the ground formerly claimed by the left that they have made themselves an important force in American politics...

...He tends to get carried away, for instance, with ringing evocations of the value of tradition, without pausing to explore the fact that some traditions are more valuable than others— something that in his better moments he's sensitive to...

...Novelist Rosellen Brown surveys ten recent books by young 110 writers and finds that they have in common a disturbing "reduction in emotional volume" and a withdrawal of concern from the social world...

...now is a time for carving...