A Material Difference: Notes on the Newness of 1980s Fiction
Hendin, Josephine
The rich diversity of American fiction has always made newness difficult to characterize. But the 1980s have seen not only the arrival of fresh work by writers who have long established that...
...Is the Hero-as-Nostril only the aberrant creation of under-thirty writers who have come of age in the era of cocaine...
...The end of spontaneity is written in the need to see intimacy as an achievement, the product of specific (and quantifiable...
...The postmodern sense of fragmentation is now revealing itself in a vision of emotions as artifacts, of people as objects in a society whose common culture is increasingly standardized...
...Most of the fiction that has appealed to college students has involved a sense of social or generational conflict or advocacy of a hedonistic, experiential ethic at variance with the competitive work ethic of American culture...
...Like Paola, the young woman in Thomas Pynchon's V., who can speak only in nouns, the characters find meaning only in objects...
...According to author David Leavitt, writing as the voice of the under-thirty literary generation in "New Voices and Old Values" in the New York Times Book Review of May 12, 1985, they have all "in general limited themselves to the short story, a form they seem to find appropriate to the age of ii........n 52 • DISSENT Culture In an As of Mousy shortened attention spans, fractured marriages and splintering families in which they grew up...
...Before she became a groomer, something she likes, she used to be a housewife and mother...
...It achieves this goal in several ways: through compressing and limiting explicit reference to trigger words such as "divorce," a label used as the justification for turmoil, through flattening affect by denying differences between minor and great misfortune, and by treating passionate situations as "relationships" to be worked on and over...
...They are excited...
...Their collective, contrived voice is "especially big on the details surrounding 'relationships' . . . the set decorations—the bags of groceries, the copies of GQ and People . . . [that] tend, time and again to overwhelm the frail narratives...
...Death is just another scene...
...The memory of home is of no home...
...They need the Bolivian Marching Powder...
...Reflecting the aspirations and anxieties of coming-of-age, cult heroes dramatize the ethos of the day...
...Mother has moved and leased an apartment to be near her son, which sounds conventional enough except for the fact that she is herself something of a rolling stone...
...But I don't see my options...
...His characters have spent so much time listening to the Eagles, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Killer Pussy that they have been rendered inarticulate...
...It does not torment so much as contract 56 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money the soul into a "small adjustment...
...When the test results came back, they showed that Vernon had mononucleosis...
...The Hero as Nostril is nose without sense, an inhaling mechanism without the power to smell...
...Buying coke is the model for all experience: the purchase of self, the acquisition of other people...
...And yet no one in his novel would know the meaning of Holden Caulfield's favorite pejorative, "phony...
...The eyes don't look at me, though...
...In Raymond Carver's "Boxes" a man says of his newfound lover: Jill always says what's on her mind...
...They need to be fed...
...She is drugged to the hilt (See, it doesn't hurt...
...The more particulars, the better...
...A new definition of the self, a new vision of subjectivity is being reflected in 1980s fictions...
...Raymond Carver examines our cultural condition from the vantage point of paucity...
...The solution to both memory and snowstorm is a regression to not thinking and not speaking...
...What is being standardized is the self in fiction and perhaps in theory...
...It is only in the description of mutilated or exploited youngsters that some pathos emerges as our hero feels kinship with both male and female sexual victims...
...Her daughter's diary lists Roberta's demise in the changing labor Roberta performs and in her loss of sexual confidence...
...But she has run out of patience with my mother...
...Home for Christmas break in Ellis's Less Than Zero, the Nostril as affluent young Californian finds neither a constraining nor loving family, nor one in which there is a difference in values between parents and children...
...In this materialism of experience lies an analogue to the brand name obsessions of McInerney and Ellis, a common urge to flee from interiority to surface...
...More concerned than Beattie or Carver with the nuances of intimacy, Munro has nevertheless made it possible to understand how people can feel they do not "own" their own emotions...
...He makes us see a deeper aspect of the absence of generational differences than found in Ellis or McInerney...
...This standardization is effected in several ways...
...Delving into its ambivalences, they report that collisions between emotion and materialism, individualism and commercial culture, youth and middle age, have forged a new consensus about our shared limitations and vulnerability, a consensus in the shape of a birth: a shelterseeking self...
...The experience of ambivalent love is objectified and given a new bent by this sense of inevitability, a fated absence of what Carver calls "options...
...An attack on authority and authoritarianism figured in the feminist assault on the double standard, fueling mass market bestsellers of the 1970s, from Fear of Flying by Erica Jong to the ambitiously belletristic novel of Francine Duplessix Gray, Lovers and Tyrants...
...Material Differences Something new has been created from the union of materialism and emotion...
...Plus, she had her own medical bills...
...Now George, with his on-again-off-again interest, inflicts the pain of unstable commitment on her...
...In the son's tearful recognition that he can do nothing for his mother, Carver discloses how a sense of filial responsibility can be reduced to an impotent yearning to be kind, even as all memory of love can be limited to the single word, "dear...
...I tell my mother I love her and I'll write to her, yes...
...This 1980s fiction discloses a fascination for advertising culture most simply in the use of brand names in character definition, but more profoundly in utilizing and adapting its processes: compression, packaging, and quantifying...
...The sweet brotherliness of Holden Caulfield in recoil from adulthood reflected the 1950s belief in authenticity, innocence, and family as bulwarks against the crassness of the social world...
...he too has had to be ready to move wearily on, looking for work and love without prospect of security...
...In a belated effort at explaining what drives his hero, when the book is nearly over, McInerney introduces his mother who, near death, wishes she could have lived the way he does...
...The "small adjustment" is their recoil from adulthood toward the smallness of childhood, evidenced in such childlike symbolic actions as wrapping themselves in each other's coats and avoiding their bed...
...For the eighteen-year-old hero of Less Than Zero, advertising posters mounted above his 50 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money bed define his crisis of faith and emotional disconnections: It's the promotional poster for an old Elvis Costello record...
...What distinguishes its vision of youth is primarily an enormous enervation on and off cocaine...
...Bright Lights, Big City was not simply a successful novel...
...Isn't it funny . . . the idea of a pattern like that...
...On the phone with his mother, who has moved back to California, the son, pained by her chronic dissatisfaction, remembers the affectionate name my dad used sometimes when he was talking nice to my mother—those times, that is, when he wasn't drunk...
...McInerney's characterization of a man of literary sensibility is effected not through a representation of consciousness, but by the ownership of unread books, contempt for the underyuppie class, and the ability to give such imaginative names to cocaine as "Bolivian Marching Powder...
...Alice Munro, a Canadian, has won critical praise and an enthusiastic American audience...
...Yet her son's past and future are clearly her present life...
...There is in progress a quiet but sharp recoil from the concepts of self and society, from the quest for authentic emotion, from the visions of individualism and possibility that have been animating forces in our literature...
...You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unravelled nerve endings...
...An heir to the traditions of American naturalism, he sees the lives of his working-class characters as largely dictated by economic circumstance...
...But the 1980s have seen not only the arrival of fresh work by writers who have long established that diversity, but also the fracturing of literary culture along quasipolitical lines: the rise of a multi-ethnic literature encompassing the work of Chinese-Americans, Indians, African-Americans, and European ethnics, a growing gay literature, and new additions to feminist fiction...
...But in an older literature they are attributes of counterculture characters, the young, the isolato, the beat, whose drifting reflected a rejection of bourgeois values...
...Serial purchases, episodic peaks and lows before scoring, make shopping the ultimate human act...
...Suffering does not enlarge character or understanding...
...The body here is something to sell or see, not enjoy...
...Cocaine-based novels are only the most extreme example of cultural change in which the traditional American faith in individualism, in insurgent selves transcending, withstanding, or at least withholding assent from unpalatable environments, is dying...
...His distraught and destroyed senses, mirrored in McInerney's often impressive surreal style and speed-blurred descriptions, are incredibly precise at conveying name-brand identification...
...fathers get face lifts and take their young homosexual lovers to family parties...
...changes to six A.M...
...Produced as a paperback original in Random House's Vintage Contemporaries line, it was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, a first novel that rapidly sold out its first printing and justified the "NATIONAL BESTSELLER" emblazoned on its cover along with that other label of distinction, "MAJOR MOTION PICTURE...
...Although our hero is bisexual, the likelihood of his waking up with either a man or woman does not multiply his fun...
...Carol and Vernon, whose daughter, Sharon, died years before, visit their closest friends, Matt and Gaye...
...She keeps moaning and murmuring words and moving her head from side to side, her eyes half-closed...
...The chain of association, the color imagery of red apple/ white snow, as professor Lucy Rosenthal has pointed out, leads toward the memory of Sharon's death from leukemia and of the imbalance of white blood cells and red...
...They seem almost to conform to a Lacanian theory of personality formation as the effort to discover oneself in "otherness," a differentiation of self as a "signifier" seeking to be assimilated into a purely symbolic order...
...In her unhappiness, Roberta first understands the painful insecurity she caused her husband by having an affair with George and finally by leaving him for her lover...
...In Alice Munro's "Labor Day Dinner," Roberta is a book illustrator who has left her husband for George, a man who has given up his teaching job to live in the country, fix up his dilapidated farmhouse, and sculpt...
...His hero, who works as a fact-checker at a thinly disguised version of the New Yorker, considers himself vastly superior to the girl at the bar who believes the words "decadence and Dexedrine are the high points of the language of Kings James and Lear...
...In this phenomenological orgy, to borrow from Wittgenstein, the world is all that is the (Gucci) case...
...The title is sign supreme, the label whose possession is meant to convey class...
...This series of disasters serves to flatten affect by a process of trivialization...
...What motivates the Nostril-hero is obscure...
...The literary revolution of the eighties has erupted in a fiction of those who have already gained entry...
...Subjecting the ethic of experimentation to the scrutiny of characters abraded by a complex past of serial lovers, WINTER • 1990 . 53 Culture in an Age of Money families, faiiures, this fiction explores the consequences of contemporary love...
...In the past, object-laden fiction or a literature of objectified emotion was characteristic of such European experimentalist works as Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities or the fictions of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute...
...Her body had been found at the Sun Air Drive-In hanging upside down from the swing set...
...To express his outrage, our hero asks Rip, "Why...
...Sexuality has been the staple of mass youthcult fiction, reflected in fantasies of joy and freedom and in the pursuit of new sensations...
...The enervation apparent in youthcult fiction surfaces in new fiction of middle age as ongoing depression...
...As Carol and Vernon leave after an evening with them, Matt calls out words from a Don't-Think-About-It game, terminating with, "Don't think about an apple...
...Just as McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City compresses the novel of manners to an upscale ad and Ellis's Less Than Zero reduces the novel of initiation to the equivalent of snuff-porn stills, so new fiction of "sensibility" operates to treat feelings through surfaces, breaking down the distinctions between people and things...
...Such fiction ushers us into the world of negotiated lives...
...Dear," he'd say...
...The Holmes-Rahe stress scale, for example, is widely used for measuring stress in life events...
...Virtually all are male models or prostitutes or both, who define themselves by their resemblance to David Bowie, their appearance on the cover or in the pages of International Male ("No nudes, just Speedos"), and by the singers they listen to...
...The "boxes" of the title symbolize the characters' compartmentalization of their own emotional life, the packaging of emotion as though it were second-class mail...
...The fiction of personal life now emerges from a highly rationalized use of linguistic constructs as the vehicle for discovering humanity...
...Parents are busy popping pills...
...The future has arrived and seems without hope for the mother...
...There had been that fancy internist who hospitalized Vernon later in the same spring when Sharon died, and who looked up at him while drawing blood and observed almost offhandedly that it would be an unbearable irony if Vernon also had leukemia...
...The "force" of such emotional disconnection is withstood by the hero, by turning on MTV and wishing for a Valium...
...Her son also regards possessions as always packed or packable...
...Perhaps not surprisingly, this fiction has reached its widest audience in the 1980s, a period when quantification scales have also become modish in psychology...
...Each looking for love, each caught in relationships shaded by frustration, the mother, son, and Jill are equally insecure...
...Its appearance in 1980s fiction with a broad, even mass market appeal suggests both its new importance and its changed emphasis...
...In past youthcult fiction one found contempt for the treatment of sexuality as a commodity and for the phoniness of superficial looks, but in Ellis's the intertwined themes of sex, money, and voyeurism are celebrated as a descent to wallow in, disabusing the reader of literary WINTER • 1990 • 51 Culture in an Age of Money expectations of youthful idealism, social criticism, or even physical pleasure...
...In Bright Lights, Big City, parents are dead or absent, and older women are of indeterminate age...
...They appear to have majored in the names of rock singers...
...In Ann Beattie's "In the White Night," the death of a child from leukemia not only joins a list of trivial annoyances but also propels the child's middle-class parents toward being childlike themselves...
...But what is at stake may be more than commercially oriented teaching or the vagaries of youth: these talented young writers are mirroring a striking change...
...Death diminishes by a process that seems to be one of miniaturization in which surfaces both express and limit whatever pain there is...
...The film was of something real, the castration could not have been faked, someone says...
...Rooted in the culture of acquisition, Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero has an enraptured following among high school and college students...
...It uses language to rationalize and institutionalize emotional trauma...
...Elvis looks past me, with this wry, ironic smile on his lips, staring out the window...
...Characters in search of a defining place or connection are seen against the linguistic and visual constructs mass culture provides...
...You look unhappy," she says real suddenly...
...Less Than Zero has more dead and sexually mutilated young people than any novel I can remember that was not explicitly about war...
...Bleeding nostrils and tranquilized visions mark its emotional range...
...No matter...
...In embracing commercial culture, 1980s fiction focuses on both the illusions it sustains and the manipulative power of its techniques...
...In writing of the consequences to emotional life, he produces a meditation on the relationship between the power of circumstance and the meaning of personal responsibility...
...Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head...
...She's thirty-five years old, wears her hair short, and grooms dogs for a living...
...Mother has packed her possessions in boxes, but not left town...
...Its controlling linguistic device is a word game in which the players are asked not to think about a suggested noun...
...The vision of people as victims rather than masters of their own lives may involve a rejection of the power of individual will, but also relieves the burden of rage or guilt...
...Yet her carefully noted misery brings a kind of enlightenment...
...So much for Mom...
...In Ann Beattie's "In the White Night," Carol and her husband have survived the death of their child, but that loss is subsumed in the mother's vision of life as precisely the succession of crises you cannot escape: What happened happened at random, and one horrible event hardly precluded the possibility of others happening next...
...In Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, he lives, or rather, inhales in a spiritual confusion in which day and night are confounded: The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M...
...Being is not intrinsic, not the existential sine qua non...
...They go to college—UCLA or USC— and one even possesses Cliff's Notes to As I Lay Dying...
...In this fictional land, dramatic crisis has been subordinated to a texture of enervating hardships...
...The world, constituted as a relationship and its artifacts, has slowly grown toward being treated as the only known territory...
...Powerful novels of Vietnam and its aftermath, many by combat veterans, have added to the cultural ferment...
...You are, in effect, who and what you hear...
...The Nostril is determined to inhale only the best...
...In this novel, the answer is usually yes...
...I mean the idea is attractive, of there being that balance...
...Her two children were kidnapped by her first husband and taken to live in Australia...
...Each of these serious writers, in short stories representative of their work as a whole, has revealed similar changes in the conception of self and of tragedy...
...But ironically, her future prefigures that of her son and Jill, who distracts herself by reading a curtain catalog...
...Someone's put a lot of makeup on her, clumsily, and she keeps licking her lips, her tongue drags slowly, repeatedly across them...
...I've run out of patience too...
...In Less Than Zero all violence has been eroticized as pornography...
...Midlife Writing These currents are evident not only in young writers, but also in the work of established artists who have achieved their widest audience in the 1980s and whose works reflect the various difficulties of intimacy in middle age...
...Yet it is their not-articulating word game that provides the buffer...
...But the superficial characterization employed here substitutes a rising body count for accumulated meaning...
...Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers...
...Carver's story sensitively measures the impact on a family of the experience of futility...
...q WINTER • 1990 • 57...
...Then I say good-bye and I hang up...
...Her pleasure in her sexuality is destroyed by her fear of George's awareness of her declining looks...
...The youthcult novels of the 1980s reflect an enormous shift...
...It gives points for the death of a parent or a change in eating habits...
...Conversely, degrees of unhappiness and wrong moves can also be charted...
...It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, but always, hearing it, I felt better, less afraid more hopeful about the future...
...She's bounced back...
...They only look at whoever's standing by the window, but I'm too tired to get up and stand by the window...
...Hoping for release into the pictoral surface, the impersonal course of troubled love (quantifiable too as midlife crises), or the powdered high, cocaine, are ways of pain-killing through different forms of depersonalization...
...There are, of course, other significant differences among these writers...
...Such spare recapitulation of sentiment and its packaging in the frail word, "dear," that holds what the son knows of family love, reflect the essential containment of each of the story's characters...
...mothers drink too much, little sisters easily displace mother's voice with Killer Pussy...
...Characters seem actively to seek freedom from uncertainty, self-hatred and pain...
...There are holes in their boots and they are hungry...
...She touches her hair, bleached, blondish, again...
...If you want to do something, you have the right to do it...
...On the dark side, fiction seems to embrace the illusion that the unknown can be ruled out and the self defined by packaging glitzy or strong enough to contain and label it...
...she was presented with a bill for the bridge repair...
...In language there is a comparable constriction: the linguistic quest for T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative" is flattened into an exploitation of objects...
...Each of these writers seems to disclose, in visions of standardization, qualified relief from solitariness...
...The youthcult heroes of one period are made obsolete by those of another...
...Heavy metal...
...Less Than Zero hit national bestsellerdom and major motion picturehood in a film starring teen idol Andrew McCarthy...
...They know no modes of making money other than male prostitution, modeling, and drug dealing...
...In this country, it has been most associated with the experimentalism of such intellectual artists as Thomas Pynchon...
...They emerge as affected objects rather than initiators...
...Passivity, objectification, suppression and compression of pathos have transformed the tragedy they experience to a serial flow of misfortune, not initiated or produced by flaws in character, but simply there to be lived through...
...The author is unwittingly complicit in the externalization and standardization of feeling and seems to be writing from the center of a condition he or she cannot control...
...Carol frowned...
...In the 1980s we encounter the new Self in its most extreme form: the Hero as Nostril...
...Real tragedy can only be dealt with indirectly by displacement onto surface images of the leukemia-snow and red apple...
...I style and modes of characterization, the youthcult fiction of the 1980s is a fiction not of insurgency, but of cultural collaboration...
...No longer to be lamented, abhorred, or transcended, death is to be relished either as a spectacle or a justification for emptiness...
...Jill had to borrow money to bury him, and then—can you beat it...
...He didn't have life insurance, not to mention property-damage insurance...
...His most frequent contacts are with men and his descriptions of desired bodies are largely those of men...
...Even in this fiction it is clear that the primacy of individual experience is seriously in doubt...
...But these youthcult novels reflect no such interest...
...They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night...
...McInerney has produced a distinctive literary effort: the compression of the novel of manners into an equivalent of upscale ads...
...Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it's been shaved...
...What stands out is an assimilation, to the point of wholesale adoption, of advertising culture...
...The spectacle, the object, the impersonal texture, and, as Munro puts it, "the pattern," have become synonymous with experience itself...
...Not even a dying mother runs deep...
...Raymond Carver received both critical acclaim and commercial success in the 1980s...
...Ellis uses the names of rock groups to define self...
...Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush...
...This story uses language paradoxically to defy verbalization rather than to articulate feeling...
...The self so circumscribed is not a youthcult invention but rather a postmodernist construction, a particular emptiness waiting to become a receptacle for the cultural artifacts that surround it...
...Like the youthful protagonists of Ellis and McInerney, middle-aged characters in these stories do not see themselves as contributing to their difficulties...
...This recoil from Emersonianism is not simply a crisis of youth...
...These lovers are caught in a cosmic pecking order of relationships, which, if miserable, seems part of the orderly progress of circumstance...
...The snow swirls around the imagined apple...
...The fathers of Less Than Zero differ from their sons in that they have been able to accumulate in the entertainment business enough to keep their children in cocaine and BMWs and to buy young men as lovers...
...The expensive snuff movie reveals a culture of acquisition carried to an extreme in the notion that death and mutilation are highs for sale...
...The definition of sexual worth alternates between excellence in the skin trade and, on the dark side, the capacity to eroticize exploitation and death...
...Then all hell broke loose...
...Even Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, a milestone in the literature of disgust, developed its visions of sexual horror in terms that balanced physical pain with characterizations yielding a sense of psychological terror...
...I'm not," I tell her...
...The story's closing line sums up its peculiar effects: "In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel and she would see this tableau, for the second that she hovered, as a necessary small adjustment...
...Rip replies the equivalent of why not: "If you want something, you have the right to take it...
...Their sons have only contempt for their fathers' checkwriting abilities and no interest in finance...
...Now she saw an apple where there was no apple, suspended in midair, transforming the scene in front of her to a silly surrealist painting...
...Starring Michael J. Fox as the nose who knows, the film had the dazzling surfaces of the novel but not its ability to reflect a stream of consciousness that is itself filled with objects...
...You look unhappy," she says, more quietly this time...
...Family relationships float in that gray space where volition or emotion have been stripped of spontaneity...
...and about to be gangbanged in various ways by the three young men in the room who appear to have replaced film porn with a live act...
...At fault, Bawer believes, are "professors in university creative writing programs [who] tell their students that this is the way to write: load up on concrete details, relevant or not...
...The sexual freedom of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, whose Martian hero teaches the benefits of nonverbal communication, communal life, and abandoning possessive jealousy, reflected a 1960s rejection of competitive, acquisitive America...
...Ann Beattie has been a star in the New Yorker's constellation of writers...
...Later, Ellis throws in an anecdote about a Stanford student who gave a party in Rancho Mirage culminating in the repeated rape, mutilation, and murder of a girl whose throat "had been slit and her breasts had been cut off and someone had stuck candles where they used to be...
...Yet the memory is displaced from the child onto the snow and to the friends whose advice was not to think...
...In "Boxes," Carver focuses on the feelings produced by family relationships in a world in which generational differences between mother and middle-aged son have been eroded by shared experience...
...Vernon sees Matt and Gaye as buffers, "alter egos who absorbed and enacted crises, saving the two of them from having to experience such chaos...
...There was the time the Christmas tree caught fire, and she rushed toward the flames, clapping her hands like cymbals, and Vernon pulled her away just in time, before the whole tree became a torch and she with it...
...Yet with both men and women, the Nostril's experiences are rather like standing on line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau...
...The young man of the 1980s is supposed to be infatuated with making money...
...Reaching their house after the drive through the snow, the couple sleeps in the living room, Vernon in Carol's jacket on the sofa, Carol on the floor with Vernon's coat about her...
...the high cost of the film seems additional proof that they have seen two actual murders...
...Nothing," I say...
...brand names have only now flowered into use as major social referents, whether what is being mentioned is the cookie bought in a supermarket or a luxurious fur...
...He himself is a man who knows the titles of the best works: "As I Lay Dying, Under the Volcano, Anna Karenina, Being and Time, The Brothers Karamazov," even if he has kept himself innocent of their contents...
...Trouble is something that happens to them...
...In "Boxes," they express the experience of working-class families propelled out of their niche by unemployment, out of family harmony by drinking or drugs, and able to find rest nowhere...
...When Hobo, their dog, had to be put to sleep during their vacation in Maine, that awful woman veterinarian, with her cold green eyes, issued the casual death sentence with one manicured hand on the quivering dog's fur and called him "Bobo" as though their dog were like some circus clown...
...Drinking white wine, the Nostril's mother tries to smile when she asks me what I want for Christmas...
...Her son has little time for her, having met and become preoccupied with Jill, his new woman, and with trying to achieve economic stability...
...In this litany, the abduction of children is not distinguished from outrageous bills or physical abuse...
...steps taken to ensure and define success...
...The youth culture fiction of the 1980s has virtually eliminated the conflict of generations...
...It does not aim for the power of Anna Karenina, with its apocalyptic passion and loss, or even of Herzog, with its histrionic magnifications of the betrayed husband...
...Are you stressed out on trivia or tragedy...
...Alice Munro's work discloses how the need to "work at relationships" may be analogous to the need to quantify misfortune...
...She doesn't say anything else, until she's finished her third glass of wine and poured her fourth...
...Ellis's hero hires out as a voyeur while his friend turns tricks for a man who, Hollywood style, enjoys an audience most...
...What counts is the count...
...The youthcult fiction of the 1980s differs from any we have encountered before...
...Uprootedness and drifting are virtually WINTER • 1990 • 55 Culture in an Age of Money classical American motifs...
...he has too little feeling for the gradual and now final withdrawal of his wife, a fashion model and perfect label-wearer...
...You do too," I say, hoping that she won't say anything else...
...I'm surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her...
...Some fiction of middle age shares with youthcult fiction a denial of the tragic force of death...
...each has written passages in which life is rendered as a list of objective events projecting the rough texture of married life...
...Knowingly or unwittingly, 1980s writers are our pollsters of the contemporary soul...
...There is no correlating link of attendant emotion or depth...
...In the light of the novel, it may refer more persuasively to traffic patterns at freeway entry points than to missed emotional rapport...
...What seems to be important is not what happens to you, but how many items you can list to quantify and therefore establish your legitimate claims as a sufferer...
...individuals are only carriers looking for a sign, a billboardself...
...Forsaking her art, Roberta has become enslaved to George's food needs and his moldering house...
...Yet all these often "radical" voices do not so much signal what has changed as serve the traditional end of extending our fiction's longstanding concern with the drama of marginal man beating at the doors of society...
...On the brighter side, 1980s fiction finds, in the operative processes for sustaining such illusions, coping devices...
...The word "Trust" hovering over his head, and his sunglasses, one lens red, the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly off center...
...Visiting Rip, our hero sees a naked twelveyearold girl ("She goes to Corvalis...
...Her second husband, who drank, left her with a broken eardrum before he drove their car through a bridge into the Elwha River...
...Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Alice Munro are each exceptional short story writers whose widest audiences have been won in the 1980s...
...Hailed by the Playboy reviewer as a "Catcher in the Rye for the MBA set," the novel's success underscored how aptly its talented twenty-nine-year-old author, in capturing a contemporary hero, had understood the culture's changing values and equation of materialism with the substance of being...
...The condition described in extreme ways in these novels cannot be dismissed so easily, partly because it differs in degree but not in kind from the worldview of many younger writers who do not deal with cocaine, but instead have tried to write about personal life...
...It springs from the era of separation and divorce agreements, visitation rights, and custody arrangements...
...Ellis, barely into his twenties when the novel was published, was, like McInerney, hailed for producing "an updated Catcher in the Rye...
...In this literature, character is entirely the product of acts of appropriation indistinguishable from buying...
...At the close of the novel Ellis includes a scene of a group of beautifully built young men in a Malibu beach house watching a $15,000 snuff movie in which two adolescents are violated by a huge man who later castrates the boy and mutilates the girl...
...The Beck Depression Inventory, also in vogue during the decade, often seems to be on the minds of characters who observe and count the pangs of love...
...Ellis offers as a meaningful cri de coeur the ambiguous opening line of the novel: "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles," spoken by a girl picking our hero up at the airport...
...In the movement toward surfaces there may be a search for ways of relieving what is perceived as unalterable in the inner life...
...It was a publishing phenomenon...
...But the comparable fiction of the 1980s seems to be giving up the counterculture attack on adulthood, authority, and repression...
...Bruce Bawer, in a pejoratively titled essay, "The Literary Brat Pack," accuses Leavitt, Elizabeth Tallent, Meg Wolitzer, Marian Thurm, Peter Cameron, and others of writing "exactly alike," of having forsaken an original voice to buy the modish sound purveyed to them by writing programs...
...Ellis's Rip is not only a pusher but is also into violating innocence...
...Even old friends, the boys our hero went to high school with, have themselves become marketable objects inspiring one thought: Are they for sale...
...Dear, try not to be afraid," I say...
...The moral sense is not entirely absent, but it might as well be in this fiction in which the enduring relationship is between the Nostril and his coke supplier...
...Soft rock...
...She can tell this story now...
...Thus these characters seem doomed to equate personality with external objects, to discover self as and in objectified form...
...His habitat is the toilet stall of an WINTER • 1990 • 49 Culture In an Age of Money expensive restaurant or an in disco, for, together with cocaine, he inhales status sites and brand names...
...Passive consumption of rock, television, films, tranquilizers, and cocaine defines the world of the novel...
...Labels, name brands, surface signs have become the sole social referents and methods of character definition...
...This youth fiction of personal life has been criticized for being insufficiently true to individual differences and for accepting commercially viable, collectivized notions of self...
...Mulling this over, our Nostril walks out to powder his nose or, more precisely, to snort his newly purchased cocaine...
...Perhaps nothing reveals what has changed more than the transformation of those heroes and anti-heroes propelled toward mythic stature by an avid college market...
...There is no 54 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money distinction made between tragedy and annoyance: the death of a child, misplaced fear of serious illness, or someone forgetting the name of a dog...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
