thereadingexperience

The Attempt to Write

(This essay originally appeared in Requited, Issue 7)

A frequent criticism of creative writing programs is that they focus too narrowly on established techniques supposedly constituting “craft,” but if Gordon Mennenga is to be believed in this excerpt from We Wanted to Be Writers, very few concrete literary strategies were “taught” at all at the most famous such program, at least in the 1970s:

“The craft thing? I don’t think the topic ever came up, did it? At least not in the workshops I was in. You did your lump and threw it on the table. I was surprised we never picked out an element of “craft” and looked at it, how metaphor was used in a story, for example. We never did exercises of any kind. I suppose it’s that way still…We didn’t get into why things are done a certain way, or talk about different styles, what styles are tolerated and what aren’t…why and how.”

Although Mennenga is more blunt in his assessment of the degree to which writing “instruction” even took place at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the middle 1970s, the period of time during which the cohort of writers interviewed in We Wanted to Be Writers attended the Workshop, many of the participants in this assortment of reflections and reminiscences echo his comment. “Our teachers were writers, not teachers,” says Jane Smiley. “They knew a lot about writing, but hadn’t given a lot of thought to how to communicate what they knew.” Jennie Fields expresses outright disappointment with the teachers at Iowa, who “weren’t nearly as involved or instructive as the faculty I had as an undergraduate,” while Jayne Anne Phillips concludes that, anyway, “people enter into an MFA program, not to ‘learn” to write, but to spend time in a mentor relationship with an accomplished writer…and to be part of a community for a scant two years that supports literature, reading, and the attempt to write.” Co-editor Glenn Schaeffer believes “the real Workshop was a certain booth by the kitchen at the Mill, where I could watch the band, and my classmates would come by and we’d drink beer and talk about writing.”

We Wanted to Be Writers is essentially an extension of this “talk about writing,” although it is at least as much talk about being a writer after fulfilling the aspiration of the title as it is talk about writing or learning to write. Indeed, the book’s subtitle gives a more accurate description of the ultimate focus of the book: “life, love, and literature.” It is presented as something like a collective memoir by this cohort of writers (which also includes T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Sandra Cisneros among its best-known members, as well as Marvin Bell and John Irving as teachers during this time), a memoir that is presumably justified because Schaeffer and his fellow editor, Eric Olsen, believe “our cohort to date, as a slice of scribblers, is the most decorated in the history of American letters, as far as having been enrolled at the same graduate institution at one time.” There is a tension in the book between this rather self-congratulatory explanation of the book’s existence and the effort to illuminate the influence of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop on the accomplishments of this “slice of scribblers” that is never satisfactorily resolved. The editors might say the book is intended to both chronicle a collective experience and examine the effects of creative writing programs on American fiction and poetry, but ultimately these goals may be at cross-purposes: The experiences are too superficially explored to be distinctive or surprising, while the focus on “life” at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop precludes extensive critique of the instructional methods used there and their utility in developing the talents of this literary greatest generation.

To call this generation “the most decorated” is not, of course, to say it is the most talented or most accomplished. A good case could be made that this cohort did indeed manage especially well to combine seriousness of intent (a dedication to “literature”) with a degree of commercial success or popular appeal (one of the graduates is a television writer whose credits include writing for The Sopranos), but is the implicit claim being made by this book that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop played some formative role in guiding these writers to this sort of success? Surely it can’t be that they were more naturally gifted than other groups of aspiring writers “enrolled at the same graduate institution,” including previous and later groups at the Iowa Workshop itself. Nor on the basis of what is revealed here about the level of instruction at the Workshop could the assertion be made that it imparted some special insights into the nature of literary creation. Is the focus on this particular class and the affirmation of its prestige meant to validate the Workshop’s status as the preeminent “program” of its kind? If so, what did it actually do for these students that could be seen as a contribution to literature?

Again if Glenn Schaeffer is to be believed, its contribution isn’t specifically literary at all, nor was the Iowa Writer’s Workshop finally teaching primarily writing. Instead, it was the center of what Schaeffer calls in his introductory chapter a “creative enterprise,” its principal object to foster a broader “creativity.” Creativity as encouraged by the Writer’s Workshop is in fact entirely compatible with creativity in business:

“Creativity captures and holds the attention (or money) of others, whether signified as audience or customers. In fact, people depend on narratives to get them through life; neuroscience tells us that our brains are hardwired to organize our existential states as ongoing narratives, draft upon draft of them. Therefore, a concept in business, as in a story, must be told forcefully and simply, using consequential logic mixed with dramatic leaps. Writers who can convince us of the real through the artifice of story are similar to entrepreneurs: Both start every day with the barest essentials, hoping to change us or our experience of the world, and struggle toward expression on the blank page, or the blank drawing board (infernally resistant media in either case)….”

Since Schaeffer himself went on from the Workshop to become a successful businessman, one could interpret this strained analogy as a necessary rationalization for his project of revisiting his previous “literary” indulgence. but it also helps to explain the amount of space devoted rather tediously to “process,” talk about how those who did make careers in writing organize their creativity. Although one writer does claim that a helpful “lesson” learned at the Workshop was provided specifically by John Irving through his efforts to “model” his own process in writing a novel, developing a systematic process suitable to a professional writer was otherwise not something the Iowa Writer’s Workshop appears to have much emphasized. Given the typical structure imposed by the workshop model in the vast majority of creative writing programs—a fixed number of submissions per semester, due at fixed intervals—these programs only accidentally teach writing discipline, as student writers scramble to meet the quota while struggling against the time constraints. In this way as well, We Wanted to Be Writers seems less designed to identify the beneficial practices of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop than to celebrate the superior skill level of this specific cohort who happened to pass through the Workshop together, as its members have developed the requisite discipline, perhaps in spite of the failure of the Workshop to sufficiently alert them to its importance.

Some of the writers interviewed here complain about other ways in which the Workshop’s failed to prepare them for the concrete realities of being a “professional” fiction writer or poet. Co-editor Olsen avers that “maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but when I left and got into writing for a living (as if), I was amazed at what a rube I was. I was an Iowa grad, and I didn’t know crap about the real world of publishing…We absorbed the occasional dose about the art, but there wasn’t much nuts and bolts about the business or the craft.” If We Wanted to Be Writers works at all to sort through the at times conflicting goals to which creative writing is necessarily devoted—to “art,” to “business,” to “craft”—it seems to depict the Iowa Writer’s Workshop as more comfortably focused on art, even if there was little organized effort to specifically delineate the arts of fiction and poetry, little understanding of how to systematically “teach” those arts. The Workshop, no doubt like most creative writing programs at that time, was apparently a stimulating and convivial place for a collection of aspiring writers to reside for a time while also providing them an opportunity to concentrate on their writing and receive a critical response, but it was hardly the place to get a sophisticated education in literary aesthetics.

A number of those writers who themselves went on to be teachers of creative writing observe that instruction in most programs has improved significantly, and, to judge by the descriptions some give of their own teaching methods, it is likely that this is the case. But for the most part, such an improvement is a pedagogical improvement, an increase in efficiency or a more productive focus on process, not derived from fresh inspiration about how to develop aesthetic sensibility or determine appropriate artistic standards. Perhaps achieving such things is impossible, or, even if an effort could be made to orient creative writing in such a direction, perhaps undesirable, especially in lower-tier programs without pretensions to producing many ambitious “literary” writers to begin with. But there is little evidence that even “prestige” programs such as Iowa are graduating writers who are transforming American literature with their superior appreciation of the “art” of fiction or poetry. Instead, the very improvements in the teaching of creative writing have themselves arguably helped reduce creative writing to the acquisition of “craft” in the narrowest sense of the term.

It is doubtful that the workshop method of instruction, which most creative writing programs have adopted from the Iowa model, could ever work to privilege “art” as the primary ambition to be pursued by the workshop’s participants. The natural tendency of the workshop is surely to migrate toward issues of commercial acceptability or publishing prospects, issues that focus attention on the common lot of expectations facing the aspiring writer, lest discussion devolve into incoherence through the chaos of inevitably various and conflicting assumptions about aesthetic value. Individual instructors might want to dispense “the occasional dose about the art,” but students aiming to become professional writers are inevitably going to regard their instructors most of all as sources of information about the publishing world and as valuable conduits to that world. In creative writing programs that have themselves come to serve predominantly as conduits to the publishing world—and to supplementary sinecures as creative writing instructors in other creative writing programs, sinecures that have become crucial adjuncts to the publishing world—”business” and “craft” have inexorably come to be unavoidable concerns, arguably to the point that “art” is something left to take care of itself.

In the mid 1970s, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop apparently was still a place where simply being around other writers and aspiring writers, in an environment in which the writer’s vocation was taken seriously, was enough to make the experience worthwhile. Although the cohort represented in We Wanted to Be Writers of course had their ambitions to become recognized poets and novelists, few of them seem to have regarded the Workshop as a “professional” program providing direct preparation for a career in writing. Certainly they do not seem to have considered it certification for a job teaching creative writing. While many of them did wind up teaching in creative writing programs, the impression one gets from the comments in this book’s final chapter, which chronicles the group’s post-Workshop experiences, is that most of them fell into teaching as a job they now found themselves qualified to do. Most presumably attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop because they indeed wanted to be writers and it promised to help them attain that goal. One could conclude from the testimony of this book that at this time “creative writing” had not quite reached the self-perpetuating status it now occupies, through which the advanced creative writing degree provides students the appropriate credential to themselves become teachers of creative writing. That this is the current situation does not mean students enrolled in creative writing no longer want to be writers first of all, but it does mean that what began as institutional support that provided writers some security from an unreliable marketplace, whereby thay could also pass along first-hand advice to interested students, has become itself the primary means by which writers declare their intention to become writers in the first place.

Eric Olsen expresses the usual justification for creative writing from the writer’s/instructor’s perspective:

“Absent other forms of reliable support for writers, absent a marketplace that values writing and rewards writers commensurate with their labor (or at least sufficient to cover basic necessities), a teaching gig is about as good as it gets, until those royalties kick in, anyway.”

But by now, for the vast majority of writers with teaching positions in creative writing programs, those royalty checks will never “kick in,” at least not to the degree such writers might relinquish those positions to write “full time.” On the one hand, we could regard this state of affairs as even stronger justification for the now very extensive system of creative writing programs, which allows writers who otherwise would struggle to survive in an unfriendly commercial environment to keep writing. On the other, we might wonder if this system is artificially both maintaining a storehouse of writers who will never receive much attention and enticing students into pursuing a “career” that will never really emerge.

Perhaps it doesn’t finally matter. There are surely worse ways to spend a life than in talking about writing with literary-minded students, and much less rewarding legacies of one’s education that insight into “creativity.” Although one could still ask whether, whatever service the system of creative writing performs for individuals and for the American university system at large, it performs an equal service for American literature.

Sincerity and the Surface: On Nicholson Baker

    Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Nicholson Baker's fiction is the way it seems both to ingratiate and provoke, aspires to be both accessible and difficult. Most of his novels could be described as at the same time formally simple--a man tends to his six-month old baby one afternoon, two people hold a telephone conversation--and quite radical, at least while we are still attempting to adjust ourselves as readers to such reduced narrative assumptions (which conversely expand the scope of the narrative's attention.) Stylistically, the novels are also simultaneously transparent, with few "literary" affectations, and elaborate, the sentences themselves expanding in length and complexity to meet the challenges of the kinds of minute observations and prolonged reflections in which Baker's narrators habitually engage. Even the themes of Baker's books can seem both obvious and not that easy to discern. What finally are we to make of the succession of images and memories that go through the mind of the narrator of The Mezzanine as he ascends an escalator, or are we left simply with the fact of their succession? How are we to regard the narrator of The Fermata, who tells us of his magical powers to suspend time, which he then exploits to remove the clothing of desirable women? Is he repulsive? Pathetic? An honest portrayal of the creepier inclinations harbored by all men, maybe by everyone?

    Baker is probably best known for works such as The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and A Box of Matches, in which the dilation of time, the obsessive recording of detail, and the constant sidetracking onto secondary and tertiary paths of thought characterizing his work are most pronounced. These novels test the reader's patience with their narrators' propensity to digress, as well as their intense interest in such things as shoelaces and airplane tray tables, but the narrators go about their business with such good cheer, assuming we will of course share such interests and appreciate the painstaking delineation of them, our resistance is weakened, ideally leading us to reconsider our presumptive need for a more recognizable story to develop. As the first, most audacious, and probably most successful of these books, The Mezzanine in particular seems likely to endure as a signature work, both standing as an impressively achieved first novel and providing potential insights into Baker's strategies that I believe can help us approach Baker's other books as well, even those that might seem departures from the expectations set up by The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, his second novel.

    Because at the time The Mezzanine was published "minimalism" was the most prominent trend in American fiction, some critics did attempt to associate this novel with minimalist neorealism, and there are on a first impression some reasons to regard Baker both as a minimalist of sorts and as a realist. Although his minimalism is a minimalism of plot rather that style, Baker's first books do seem to share with minimalism an inclination to pare back the ambitions of fiction and to return it, after the purported excesses of postmodernism, to a more willing acceptance of the conventions of realism. However, their reduction of plot to such microlevels of act and observation are so extreme, their fixation on surface details so insistent, they could almost be regarded as parodies of minimalism. Fiction's scale and scope have been constrained so radically in these novels that it may even at first seem they do not ask to be taken seriously. When it eventually becomes clear the author is sincere indeed, the effect is if anything more comic yet, although certainly Baker's narrators do not intend for us to take their accounts with anything other than the dedicated seriousness of purpose with which they are related.

    Ultimately Baker's minimalism is really its own kind of maximalism. The microscopic focus on quotidian objects and processes that ordinarily escape our notice is way of rescuing them from neglect, of preserving them in their actual profusion as elements of human reality. His characters are so immersed in their environments and their interests that the perspective normally provided in a work of fiction, which avoids proliferation of detail and refrains from following all streams of thought in the selective way that allows a story to emerge, is necessarily replaced with one that sacrifices story but arguably stays closer to reality--at least as these characters engage with it. Moreover, their preoccupations are certainly not registered in a style that could be called minimalist:

. . .For a second the fifteen-percent figure made me unhappy, and then I thought, Fine, yes, I welcome all this imperfect mingling--I want this circling refluxion of our old reconditioned pleasures and our new genuine ones to continue for years, decades, until it becomes impossible to trace backward the history of any particular liking, just as it was impossible to unstir the rash dollops of red or yellow tint my mother used to add to the custom-mixed paints she got from Sears: she used old peanut butter jars as receptacles, and sat cross-legged in the side yard pouring imperceptibly different yellow-greens from one jar to another, refining the color that she wanted for the porcelain-knobbed dresser in my sister's room, though the young technician in the paint department at Sears had with apparently scientific precision injected what seemed to me a perfectly acceptable series of squirts of yellow, cyan, and magenta from the paint organ into a while base, according to the recipe in a notebook for the sample chip my mother had matched to the border of the cloth calendar. . . . (Room Temperature)

    In what may be Baker's most notorious books, Vox, The Fermata, and now House of Holes, we are presented with characters whose preoccupation is with sex, but even here the emphasis is on variety and detail. Baker is not really concerned with the psychology of sex, with sex as an expression of love or intimacy, or even with sex in the conventional form of sexual intercourse. All of these books emphasize the multifarious ways of eliciting sexual arousal and of achieving sexual release. Autoeroticism and mutual masturbation occur as frequently as actual sexual congress between a man and a woman (and Baker's depiction of sexual activity is almost entirely heterosexual). Fantasies of sex are perhaps as common as sex itself. The most noteworthy quality of Baker's treatment of sex may be the way it emphasizes the sheer enjoyment sex provides. The depiction of sexual desire and the myriad ways it might be satisfied is relentlessly sex-positive, even in The Fermata, whose narrator acts on his fantasies in a way many readers could find distasteful. Vox is an unambiguous celebration of sex, in this case allowing both its male and its female protagonist to indulge their uninhibited fantasies.

    House of Holes is even more emphatically about sex than Vox or The Fermata. One could argue that Vox is also about the need for caution in sexual relations in the AIDS era, with its protagonists confining themselves to the safety of phone sex, or about "sex" as an artificial construct, a phenomenon of language, while The Fermata could be taken as a satire of the male preoccupation with sex. Both of these novels certainly offer representations of explicit sexual activity (at least in fantasies), but neither could really be called pornographic in either legal or artistic terms. Each features well-rendered, believable characters whose existence cannot be reduced to their participation in sexual activity. The creation of these characters involves subtle uses of point of view, so that in Vox the more aggressive and at times more explicit conversation of the male caller is balanced off against the more restrained sensuality evidenced in the talk of the female caller, each influencing the other, eventually approaching a kind of harmony that mirrors the movement of a love story. The Fermata is related to us in the first person by its potentially unsympathetic narrator, but Baker gives him a voice that is undeniably engaging and helps to mitigate the contempt we might otherwise have for him, an aesthetic triumph that in itself brings redeeming value to the novel that raises it beyond the pornographic.

    House of Holes has few of these complexities and might indeed be the most direct and sustained exercise in pornography of the three sex novels. It is about people having sex, explicitly and in almost innumerable varieties. There is no single protagonist or controlling consciousness, simply a third-person narrator relating the various characters' escapades at the House of Holes, an erotic resort to which its sundry visitors suddenly find themselves transported by entering real holes. This initial fantasy device--characters are sucked through a hole on a golf green, through a straw, etc.--sets up the House of Holes as itself a place where sexual fantasies can be fulfilled, and Baker lets him imagination loose. In addition to depicting a multitude of sexual positions and expressions, the novel features a severed arm and hand adept at pleasuring women, a "crotchal transfer" whereby a man and woman exchange genitals, and a sculptress who gives birth to her sculptures (made of "ass wood") after engaging in anal intercourse. As in Vox and The Fermata, sex is portrayed with great energy and humor, and while it is all very colorful and explicit, it would be difficult to call this a "dirty" book, if to be dirty or smutty requires that sex be implicitly regarded as shameful, something that otherwise should remain furtive, hidden from view and excluded from conversation.

    In a recent essay condemning Baker for writing a book like House of Holes, Barret Hathcock asserts that it is indeed a dirty book and cannot "be evaluated as anything but pornography." That House of Holes consists of graphic representations of sex is undeniable, but Hathcock's assumption appears to be that if the novel is pornographic it is thus by definition irredeemable as literary art. He goes so far as to charge that Baker is "demeaning" himself by indulging in the pornography of this novel. But there is no reason to conclude that even if a literary work can be called pornographic it can't also be worthwhile as art. The possibility that the pornographic representations in House of Holes might make some readers uncomfortable or even offend them is not itself a reason to assert the author ought to feel shameful because he is not also uncomfortable. It is also no reason to regard the work as without value, however difficult one might find it to appreciate that value because of a distaste for the sexual content it offers.

    Hathcock believes that House of Holes could be aesthetically credible only if it were to "comment" on "our current sex-saturated culture" or if it revealed "an interesting "inner life" in its characters, neither of which is attempted by the novel. This assumption that a work of fiction can be regarded as "art" only if it is engaged in "saying something" or in "going deep" into human consciousness (ideally both) is a widely shared one. It betrays the further, rather strange, assumption that aesthetic success has more to do with subject and content than it does with the actual fashioning of art through style and form. Presumably if Baker could be found to be satirizing sexual mores or critiquing the cultural preoccupation with sex as reflected in pornography Hathcock would find something aesthetically valuable in House of Holes. Similarly, if it were to focus on revealing what goes through the minds of the sexually adventurous characters as they frolic their way through the narrative, we would be witnessing something more appropriately aesthetic. But Baker merely presents their frolics without satire or social commentary (although certainly with humor); this is content of which Hatchcock disapproves, so it by that measure alone lacks art.¹ Such standards seem to me misguided as applied to any fiction with specifically artistic ambition, but they are especially misguided when applied to Nicholson Baker's work.

    Baker is neither a satirist nor a psychological realist. However much his fiction examines the shared (if often ignored) details of contemporary social reality, it does so not in order to dissect it but to record it, not to mock it or call it into question but simply to apprehend it fully. If anything, Baker's fiction could be accused of being too uncritical of the reality it records, too willing to accept things as they are, especially the "things" that exist as the commodities of modern capitalism. One could say that Baker's novels are "about" their characters' self-conscious immersion in their reality, but this focus is on the "inner life" only in the way in which the novels' protagonists themselves bring it to the surface. Since most of the novels are first-person narratives, we have access only to the thoughts and perceptions the narrators have chosen to verbalize. Psychologically, these characters are remarkably transparent: one would hardly think to look for their hidden motives or deep psychological conflicts. Finally, that House of Holes offers no social criticism and attempts no exploration of its characters' minds should not be at all surprising, since these ambitions have always been absent from Nicholson Baker's fiction. Baker's art is the art of sincerity and the surface.

    In some ways, sex seems a quintessential subject for Nicholson Baker's art and House of Holes his most adventurous treatment of the subject. It is a common human activity that might be considered fundamentally simple but that invites almost infinite expressions--especially in Nicholson Baker's meticulous rendering. The multiplicity of sexual acts might seem obsessional, but what have Baker's books been from the beginning but chronicles of obsession (including his own obsession with John Updike in U and I)? Similarly, one might find the episodic structure of the novel, by which each episode relates a new sexual experience, repetitive, but why would anyone familiar with Baker's work find the strategic use of repetition surprising? That House of Holes completes what is now a trilogy of sex novels suggests not so much that Nicholson Baker has a dirty mind but that he himself recognizes that this subject allows him to exploit his distinctive approach to fiction in a particularly felicitous way.

    Yet at the same time, House of Holes significantly departs from Baker's previous novels both formally and stylistically. Although it shares with those novels a refusal of conventionally plotted narrative, its use of sequential episodes, each of them tidily provided with a proper story structure, aligns it more closely with traditional storytelling, while continuing Baker's resistance to larger-scale narrative development. This episodic structure combined with the novel's large cast of characters necessitates that Baker use a third-person point of view for the first time in his published work. The narrative voice is lively enough, specializing in particular in colorful names for the sexual organs--"She lay on the bed and stuck two fingers up her simmering chickenshack and shook them"--but this voice does lack the more personal charm many of Baker's first-person narrators are able to convey through their sincere efforts to share their experiences, however strangely magnified or entangled they become. The most immediate manifestation of the different sort of voice we encounter in House of Holes is literally in its style, which is much more functional, less disposed to the sometimes circuitous syntax of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature:

    Pendle peered closely at the ad, and suddenly he felt a powerful air current pulling his hair and the whole of his head downward. He was vacuumed down into the black circle. He lost consciousness for a moment, and he came to he was in Lila's office. Lila was the director of the House of Holes. She was large and pretty in bifocals, about fifty, with lots of loose light-brown hair. Pendle told her that he was there about the job in The Rooster.

     It may really be the tamer prose style represented in a passage like this, more than the pornographic content, perhaps, that prompts some readers to regard House of Holes as a disappointment, "unworthy" of Nicholson Baker. In those scenes depicting explicit sex, such a style would seem to even further emphasize the sexual content, leaving the impression that Baker's usual facility with language has been sacrificed for the naked (so to speak) pornographic imagery. Even so, we should not overlook that much of this imagery is actually conveyed through dialogue, making House of Holes closer in form to Vox and, as in that book, framing the subject as talk about sex and the healthy loss of inhibition such talk can bring at least as much as about direct representations of sexual acts. This loss of inhibition seems to have a particularly liberating effect on the female characters, who are portrayed affirming their sexual desires and asserting their right to sexual satisfaction. If what Baker has produced here is "pornography," it is certainly much in contrast to the usual male-centered focus characterizing pornography as a genre.

     Since Baker has now written three novels about sex, we must assume that he himself considers this a subject both worthy of his time and consistent with his concerns as a writer. Perhaps it is coherent to believe that he shouldn't think so, but unless we are led to conclude that taking up this subject makes Nicholson Baker some sort of moral reprobate, I don't really know what purpose it serves to insist he should write about something else. It seems unlikely Baker would have written these novels only to provoke indignant responses from readers and critics, although House of Holes reinforces the impression his ambitions do not include the attempt to court universal approval.

¹It should also be said that Hathcock otherwise expresses admiration for Baker's work and has intelligent things to say about Baker's fiction, even if he does disapprove of House of Holes.

Kurt Vonnegut

(As a pdf)

It's hard to know why the Kurt Vonnegut stories collected in Look at the Birdie were published--literally. The book includes a brief introduction by Vonnegut's friend Sidney Offit, who tells us they may have remained unpublished because "for one reason or another they didn't satisfy Kurt" but otherwise gives no reason why Vonnegut's dissatisfaction needed to be overridden and this book made available. No dates of composition are given so that the reader might judge the stories in the context of Vonnegut's development as a writer, no editorial discussion of that development is provided. The best Offit can do is suggest that the "stories selected for this collection are reminiscent of the entertainments of that era [presumably the 1950s, although Vonnegut continued to write short stories into the 1960s]--so easy to read, so straightforward as to seem simplistic in narrative technique, until the reader thinks about what the author is saying." This is not much of an endorsement of work by a writer much of whose other fiction surely did ultimately transcend "entertainments of that era" to become anything but "simplistic in narrative technique."

Jerome Klinkowitz, perhaps Vonnegut's most loyal defender among scholarly critics, also wonders, why this book was published, averring that "one fears that by publishing such self-apparently weak work his executors may provide ammunition for those who would discount the author’s entire legacy." One might say that having more of Vonnegut's work in print serves a scholarly purpose, but Look at the Birdie is clearly not aimed at a scholarly audience, and its wider dissemination could indeed lead to a diminished estimation of Vonnegut's fiction considered as a whole, at least among those who are not already confirmed Vonnegut fans. The rave reviews accorded to Look at the Birdie by some of those fans only lead me to believe that something like this will happen, since no one coming to this collection without much previous acquaintance with Vonnegut's fiction could conclude it is the work of an important writer.

Despite the scholarly unfriendliness of the book's presentation, it does have value in taking a broader critical perspective on Vonnegut's work. It demonstrates that Vonnegut was correct in resisting the publication of his "magazine fiction," not just in this miscellany of unpublished/rejected stories, but also most of those collected in Bagombo Snuff Box (a second cut among the published stories), as well as, quite frankly, many of those to be found in Welcome to the Monkey House, the initially sanctioned collection of the magazine stories that appeared as Vonnegut rose to fame in the late 1960s. Vonnegut was not very good at short stories, except insofar as he was able to produce the kind of story the commercial magazines wanted and get many of them published. Most of his stories are conventionally plotted, stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental. The science fiction-y stories, such as "Harrison Bergeron" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" are the best, but there are too few of them to compensate for the formula pieces and dull domestic dramas to be found in Bagombo Snuff Box and, especially, Look at the Birdie. For a writer whose later work challenged readers' expectations of fiction, Vonnegut's short stories are disappointingly tame. That he didn't return to the form after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that he himself recognized it didn't really suit his talents as a writer.

It took Vonnegut a while, however, to locate his talent. In addition to the lackluster quality of most of his magazine fiction, his first novel, Player Piano, is mostly warmed-over Huxley and Orwell. Along with the stories, what it illustrates most of all is that Vonnegut was not a very competent writer when employing a conventional third-person narrator. The narrator of this novel is more or less omniscient, informing us, for example, that the novel's protagonist, Paul Proteus, "was the most important, brilliant person in Ilium, the manager of the Ilium Works, though only thirty-five. He was tall, thin, nervous, and dark, with the gently good looks of his long face distorted by dark-rimmed glasses." At times, it ventures the central-conscious or "free indirect" approach:

As Paul walked out to his car in the pale March sunlight, he realized that Bud Calhoun would have a mouse alarm designed--one a cat could understand--by the time he got back to the office. Paul sometimes wondered if he wouldn't have been more content in another period of history, but the rightness of Bud's being alive now was beyond question. Bud's mentality was one that had been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born--the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer. This was the climax, or close to it, of generations of Bud Calhouns, with almost all of American industry integrated into one stupendous Rube Goldberg machine.

The narrative of Player Piano is a consistently linear one, and the narrator hews very closely to Paul Proteus's perspective throughout. It makes for a very dull reading experience, even duller than 1984, which similarly employs plain language and transparent storytelling but which invokes plot devices so overwrought and melodramatic it at least arouses some sensational fascination. Player Piano is a rather tepid satire of America's fetishizing of technology and its meritocratic enablers, a theme that seems apropos for Vonnegut but that in this novel is not sufficiently enlivened.

What Player Piano lacks is the presence of that narrative voice that eventually readers will come to recognize as Kurt Vonnegut--or at least "Kurt Vonnegut," a fictional stand-in for the author who otherwise takes on the author's biographical identity. This voice first announces itself as the author in Slaughterhouse-Five, but even such first-person narratives as Mother Night and Cat's Cradle show Vonnegut shrugging off the confines of conventional third-person storytelling, both in the manipulation of point of view and the stylistic variety that brings and in abandoning the requirement of strictly linear narrative. It seems to me that this combination of an emancipated narrative voice and more casual plot development characterizes Vonnegut's most signature work, and while it is missing from the early fiction, it does begin to be discernible in his second novel, The Sirens of Titan.

The Sirens of Titan begins in an oracular voice not at all attached to any particular character, unafraid to signal its detached viewpoint:

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have any access to the puzzle boxes within them.

They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul

Gimcrack religions were big business.

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward--pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what creation was all about.

This is not quite Vonnegut speaking to us in his own voice about his own war experience in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, but it is a step in that direction. The narrator does not explicitly reveal himself as Kurt Vonnegut or otherwise draw attention to his status as the story's creator, but he clearly occupies an extradiegetic space outside the tale itself and apart from the characters' view of things. As the story proper commences, there is no attempt to "inhabit" the world view of the characters, merely to describe them, to delineate their actions and report their conversations. The narrative voice continues to hover above the invoked world, but never finally departs from the role of omniscient narrator so thoroughly as to become explicitly metafictional, as in Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions.

One might say that the narrator occupies his own "chrono-synclastic infundibulum," a warp in space and time that allows a character in The Sirens of Titan, Winston Niles Rumfoord, to be everywhere all the time and to see how "all the different kinds of truth fit together." To carry out this effect, and to create a narrative about a world in which someone might get caught up in such a thing and have access to the entire universe, requires the broader scope of a novel, and I would contend that The Sirens of Titan shows Vonnegut exploiting the formal flexibility of the novel in a way the short story--at least the kind of commercial story Vonnegut tried to write--could not sustain. That it is a work of science fiction perhaps partly explains the loosening of constraint--certainly few people at the time expected an adherence to decorum from the genre--but I doubt that many hardcore SF advocates would now cite The Sirens of Titan as a representative science fiction novel from the period. Too much of it is played for laughs, too little effort is made to fashion a story and create characters that can each be perceived as more than obvious artifice, a vehicle for the author's whimsical notions.

If it would be nice to know how "all the different kinds of truth fit together," this does not mean that those truths add up to some final knowable truth--or if it does, it's the truth that the truth is hard to find, since it must be filtered through the brain of such a fallible creature as a human being. Winston Niles Rumfoord offers a version of the truth in his invented religion, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, which is that the search for truth is futile in a universe governed by a God who doesn't care, and the novel's ultimate revelation is that human history has been guided by an effort by the planet Tralfamadore to supply one of its space travellers with a spare part (Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China are messages to this traveller, stranded on Saturn's mood Titan). There are those who think Vonnegut is a sentimental writer, or that he wrote on behalf of some amorphous version of liberal humanism, but it seems to me that such readers willfully overlook the fact that Vonnegut ultimately writes out of a profoundly disenchanted view of the human species and consistently represents existence as finally meaningless. Whatever suggestion we might indirectly derive from Vonnegut's work that we change our behavior should be received with this context in mind.

Mother Night is probably the most sustained portrayal of moral ambiguity and the elusiveness of truth among Vonnegut's novels. Anyone who thinks Vonnegut offered simplistic and unequivocal moral judgments in his fiction has not taken sufficient account of this work. Is Howard Campbell a Nazi collaborator or an American spy who helped defeat the Nazis? If he is morally culpable, is it through active sympathy with fascism or a kind of moral laziness? Which would be worse? Is he finally just an opportunist? Is his final act of hanging himself a confession of his culpability, a gesture of self-loathing, or just another implicit plea for moral absolution? I don't think any of these questions are decisively answered by the novel, however much we might want to take it as an essentially political book indicting all sides in the mid-20th century geopolitical miasma.

Vonnegut has only increased the moral ambiguity of this novel by making it a first-person narrative (albeit "edited" by "Kurt Vonnegut"). Mother Night is certainly not the first novel to take advantage of the fact that an extended first-person narrative can induce reader sympathy for even the most morally questionable characters through the narrator's voice and implicit manipulation of perspective, but it inevitably does work in this way. Vonnegut is able to invest Howard W. Campbell, Jr. with a lively enough style and and an air of sufficient self-questioning that we come to believe his attempt to reckon with his actions is sincere and perhaps that he deserves some lenience. This only makes it harder to determine the extent to which Campbell is telling the complete truth and the degree to which the proper response to his life story should be disgust and disquiet.

Yet another level of complication is added to the novel by the metafictional editorial apparatus through which Campbell's narrative is presented to us. One could view the "Editor's Introduction" explaining how the "confessions of Howard Campbell , Jr." (in its American edition) took the form in which we find it as simply a perfunctory device needed to account for th existence of the narrative--Campbell is dead---but in identifying himself as the editor, Vonnegut calls immediate attention to Mother Night as a fiction, a gesture that would seem to foreground "truth" as an already qualified goal. Of course, "qualified" does not mean nonexistent; fiction can reveal truth in its way, even if it is fundamentally a "lie." Vonnegut in the Editor's Introduction indirectly affirms this role in commenting on Howard Campbell's motivations for lying:

. . .To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.

And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect--in the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps--can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

Vonnegut (the author Vonnegut, not this fictional editor) here openly associates the "lies told for the sake of artistic effect" that might be attributed to Howard W. Campbell with the "lie" that is Mother Night itself. While one could question the extent to which Campbell's lies--if so they are--are primarily for "artistic effect," the "truth" that emerges from our reading of his confessions as the novel Mother Night is the same. One might even conclude that this truth can indeed be captured in what Vonnegut (in the actual introduction appended to the 1966 reprint of the book) calls the moral of the story, that "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," but this statement is much less obvious in its application than might at first appear. Pretending to be a Nazi while actually spying for the Allies does not seem a morally hazardous enterprise, however physically hazardous it might prove to be. Pretending to be a reformed Nazi is a more serious offense, but there really isn't much evidence from his confessions that Campbell actually remains a Nazi sympathizer.

To me, the most cogent interpretation of Howard W. Campbell's plight is that he really doesn't know who he is and that the various pretenses in which he engages is a manifestation of this indefinite sense of identity. If he is morally blameworthy, it is because he seems most interested in maintaining his own comfort. His actions are perhaps motivated by moral laziness, which leads him to avoid disruptive change, but this does not make him a monster, just as it prevents him from being a hero. It makes him, in fact, a fairly representative human being, who, like most people, can't really be condemned for acting in ways it is in his nature to act. This portrayal of human behavior is a consistent feature of Vonnegut's work, summed up in his most famous catch-phrase: So it goes.

Cat's Cradle might be a more transparent moral fable, but the burden of its message isn't likely to be congenial to those seeking inspiration or reassuring bromides. While the novel does allegorically reinforce a view of the world in which scientific/technological overreach threatens to destroy the world and the proper response to this threat is to live simply and in humility, such overreach is not easily combated and living simply is no doubt an unreachable ideal. To this extent, Vonnegut's popularity among younger readers in the 1960s and 1970s has always seemed somewhat puzzling. Vonnegut was more or less adopted as the novelist of the counterculture, but while his fiction certainly indicts the reigning socio-technological "establishment," it does so from such a disenchanted view of human nature it's hard to see the appeal to more idealistic readers who might think it can still be reformed. Perhaps the suggestion that we should get over all our hang-ups and love one another because the world is a cesspool might indeed be the ultimate countercultural statement, but in retrospect it surely doesn't seem the message to motivate a cultural revolution.

Of course, one quality of Vonnegut's work that certainly must partly explain its appeal is its humor, which on the one hand somewhat brightens the underlying gloom, giving the novels a tone of melancholy rather than outright despair, but on the other hand really only reinforces the portrayal of a human reality that is laughably impaired. Mother Night, seemingly his most straightforwardly serious novel (no role for beings from Tralfamador, no violations of the space-time continuum), is not an exception to the predominantly comic vision of Vonnegut's fiction, even if, given the subject, comedy does not seem a very suitable approach. Indeed, it is no doubt the way in which in this novel, as Klinkowitz puts it, Vonnegut "mixed the loftiest of moral thoughts with the most vulgar forms of slapstick comedy" (The Vonnegut Effect 61) that explains why his fiction was initially labelled "black humor." The characterization of, for example, white supremacist "The Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones , D.D.S., D.D." (publisher of The White Christian Minuteman) and his associates as a group something akin to The Three Stooges is both an audacious aesthetic strategy and disarmingly entertaining. In this way, Vonnegut's work is consistent with much "postmodern" American fiction of the 60s and 70s, which does not shrink from a comic treatment of all human behavior.

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut returns to a comedic perspective on religion, supplementing it with a story about the end of the world as we know it. "Bokononism," a religion created by a renegade leader on a Caribbean island, seems a somewhat more thought-out version of The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, and Vonnegut seems to be using it for a similar purpose, as a proposed substitute for traditional religions that encourage people to focus their attention on gaining the next world rather thanmaking the most of this one. Since human beings appear to have an inherent need to take instructions from an established authority, perhaps a "spiritual" authority that tells the least harmful lies possible--and that acknowledges it is telling such lies--is the best we can hope for. Bokononism is ultimately a self-negating religion that is both a recognition of the limitations of the human species and itself a manifestation of these limitations. That we would need such a religion-in-place-of-religion in the first place is a pretty sad commentary on us, although Vonnegut makes it overtly comic, as evidenced for one by the wacky names he gives to certain key elements of Bokononism: "foma"; "granfalloon"; "wampeter."

Vonnegut also in Cat's Cradle again employs a first-person narrator whose presence as filter and arranger has to be reckoned with. In this case, "Jonah" is himself a convert to Bokononism, so of course the "worldview" associated with such a way of thinking conditions both the tale and the telling. The story of how the various characters in the novel happened to come together on a remote island in a series of events that leads to the catastrophe that ensues after the accidental unleashing of "ice-nine" is a specific instance of the Bokononist concept of the interrelatedness of things. As character and narrator, Jonah develops from being more or less a passive observer to becoming an active participant in these events, mirroring his progressive immersion in and commitment to the axioms of Bokononism. Since these axioms are finally deliberate if benign lies, a careful reader would want to consider, as with Howard Campbell, the degree to which one should invest fully in Jonah's account, although I don't think it can be said that he emerges seeming more admirable than he deserves or less forthcoming than he should be. It might be said that the novel itself, like all fiction, is a benign lie, encouraging us through its narrator to come up with our own alternative to the ways of thinking that lead only to misery and destruction.

Howard W. Campbell and Jonah allow Vonnegut to explore the possibilities of voice and the role of subjectivity in fiction. In Slaughterhouse-Five, this will become Kurt Vonnegut speaking in his own dynamic voice and exploring the subjectivity of fiction itself.

Heir to a Prodigious Fertility: The Fiction of Steve Stern

(As a pdf)

The fiction of Steve Stern is arguably more suffused with traditional Jewish folklore and Judaic mysticism than all post-World War II American Jewish writers other than I.B. Singer and Cynthia Ozick. Yet Stern has said in interviews that he does not really feel himself an authentic part of that tradition, his familiarity with it being mostly second hand: "I was not born into an observant Jewish family and I really wasn’t exposed to the culture or tradition growing up, so I came into it pretty late. When I did, it began to determine the way I looked at the world and my work. Because it’s not a kind of primary experience with me—the idea of Jewish culture, tradition and heritage—I’ve had to define what that sensibility means. It’s something that I sort of wrestle with all the time" (Washington University Student Life, Nov, 21, 2008).

Few of Stern's readers could doubt that the portrayal of traditional beliefs and of a specifically Jewish milieu in his stories and novels seems thoroughly authentic. Whether the characters are rabbis or nonobservant Jews with little sense of attachment at all to tradition, they behave and speak just as one imagines such characters would behave and speak. Whether set in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 19th century or in the Jewish quarter called the "Pinch" in 20th century Memphis, Tennessee, the stories Stern tells all seem firmly rooted in place and time, with all the attendant details we could want. And whether they are the customs of the shtetl or of the American suburbs, the way of life and beliefs of the communities depicted are represented with the same authority. Although the prevailing strategy of fabulation and fantasy in Stern's work makes it problematic to regard his narratives as "realistic," certainly the interaction of character, event, and setting produces a "world" both credibly and vividly rendered.

But that world is not one that seems reproduced directly (or indirectly) from autobiographical experience. Although there are characters in Stern's fiction who might originate in a version of a younger Steve Stern, none of their encounters with Jewish practices or Jewish lore appear to be derived from the "real life" of the author except for the sense of wonder inspired in them when they are initiated in such practices by discovering them and that must indeed reflect Stern's initiation as a young folklorist in Memphis. What is most remarkable about Stern's work is the way in which he is able to evoke a comprehensively believable world through acquired knowledge and force of vision. It is an alternate world in which Catskill monologists are inhabited by the dybbuks of comedians past and rabbis fall asleep and wake up a hundred years later, a world that Stern constructs from a vibrant tradition but that ultimately conforms only to the laws of storytelling and imagination. Stern is a writer of whose work one can profitably say it is both intensely real and utterly artificial, both transparently representational and a thoroughgoing, extended metafiction.

On the one hand, the world we encounter in Steve Stern's fiction has a vividness and a tangibility that surely makes us believe in it as a version of the reality inhabited by American Jews and their immediate ancestors. This feature of Stern's work is perhaps best exemplified by the story collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1986), which offers nine stories of surpassing individual charm and almost flawless execution that also work together to memorably evoke the Pinch neighborhood on North Main Street in Memphis. By the time Stern began writing his stories (by the time he became aware of the existence of this downtown neighborhood in the first place), the Pinch had long since disappeared into urban facelessness, so Stern's depiction of it necessarily blends historical reconstruction with imaginative projection--by Stern's own account, largely the latter. The very first story in Lazar Malkin, "Moishe the Just," begins with its narrator noting how and his friends spent one summer "on the roof, spying on our neighbors across the street":

We would kneel on the sticky tarpaper, our chins propped on top of a low parapet, encrusted with bird droppings. In this way we watched the clumsy progress of the courtship of Billy Rubin and the shoemaker's daughter. We saw, like a puppet play in silhouette, Old Man Crow beating his wife behind drawn shades. Through their open windows we saw the noisy family Pinkus gesticulating over their hysterical evening meal. We saw Eddie Kid Katz sparring with shadows and amply endowed Widow Taubenblatt in her bath, but even with her we got bored.

One can't help but feel an initial alignment between the boys taking in the activities of the Pinch from their rooftop and the author of Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, identifying not so much with the lived experience of the people on the streets and in their homes but with the perspective from above, from outside that experience and attempting to find a purchase on it. But, like the boys, Stern's imagination won't settle for just the boring stuff, the ordinary cruelties and indiscretions. Although anchored in the ordinary, his fiction discovers the potential for transcendence and a place for wonder, even while the sometimes marvelous events and fanciful beings from Jewish folklore it introduces are presented as if they themselves are perfectly ordinary. The enhancement of reality Stern achieves is perhaps illustrated most suggestively in the conclusion to this book's title story. Lazar Malkin has just been spirited away by the Angel of Death, and the narrator observes:

I threw up the window sash and opened my mouth to shout. But I never found my tongue. Because that was when, before the door slammed behind them, I got a glimpse of kingdom come.

It looked exactly like the yard in back of the shop, only--how should I explain it--sensitive. It was the same brick wall with glass embedded on top, the same ashes and rusty tin cans, but they were tender and ticklish to look at. Intimate like (excuse me) flesh beneath underwear. For the split second that the door stayed open, I felt I was turned inside-out, and what I saw was glowing under my skin in place of my kishkes and heart.

The fictional world rendered in Stern's fiction is "tender and ticklish," although it does resemble the ordinary world in its external features. But ultimately Stern is more interested in the eternal than the external, even if the external view from the rooftop is where the story must begin.

Stern's characteristic use of fabulation and allegory to emphasize fundamental human experiences (however much they are represented in specifically Jewish tropes and devices) is perhaps most tellingly exemplified in "The Ghost and Saul Bozoff." This story (perhaps more appropriately called a novella) not only relates allegorically the story of Jewish immigration to America, but it must be taken as well as the allegorical account of Stern's own rediscovery of his Jewish heritage and its transformation into the fiction to be found in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. Saul Bozoff--in this story at any rate, as he makes a reappearence as a younger man in The Angel of Forgetfulness--is a "novelist of modest renown, hailed at his debut by one reviewer as 'a brave new chronicler of failure,' he had failed to fulfill his initial promise. He had, in the twenty or so years of his so-called career, written himself into ever diminishing circles of confinement." On a retreat at a writer's colony, Saul comes across a collection of stories written by one Leah Rosenthal who, he discovers, was an immigrant from the Ukraine who had died at the age of 27. Dipping into the book, he finds the stories unlike anything he's read before: "in their communion of archaic and slapstick sensibilities, their illicit marriages of Old Testament and pagan themes, the stories were hard to pin down. They seemed, despite their situation in an undeniably authentic turn-of-the-century East Side, anchored to no particular place or time."

One night, after an evening of partying, Saul looks up from his bed to find the ghost of Leah Rosenthal staring back at him. She suggests to Saul that they "collaborate," since "I had this cruelly aborted life. . .so I never got to finish what I started to say." Under Leah's influence, Saul begins to discover his own way of writing with authority:

So what next, he wondered, rubbing his hands together, looking out the window as if for a clue. Somewhere beyond the pines the old moribund world was still rallying, he supposed, for its pyrotechnical swan song. So what else was new under that smudge of a sun? For his own material, thank you, Saul would prefer to look closer to home, where there were no end of tales to relate. Here, as beneificiary of Leah Rosenthal's invisible estate, he was heir to a prodigious fertility. Stories grew on trees! And all that Saul had to do to harvest them was to be there when they ripened and fell to earth.

If we take this final story in Lazar Malkin as a dramatization of an artistic credo of sorts, then both this book and Stern's subsequent work are the fruits of an effort to harvest those story-trees. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, A Plague of Dreamers, and The Wedding Jester continue to offer the kind of emblematic narratives at work in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, most (but not all) of them set in the Pinch. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground is in fact the further elaboration of an idea contemplated by Saul Bozoff, the story of a young Jewish boy who takes up "with the black kids on Beale Street--'like their mascot or something'" and that features a black boy, previously thought mute, who suddenly "starts to jabber" and eventually dies of his malady. This novel employs less of the magical realism found in either Lazar Malkin or the subsequently published books, and seems more an attempt to flesh out the Pinch/Memphis as Stern's fictional "territory."

A Plague of Dreamers and The Wedding Jester more fully return to the fabular mode of Lazar Malkin. A Plague of Dreamers is an especially resonant effort in this mode, a collection of three novellas that not only incorporates the elements of fantasy and folklore introduced in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven but also features fictions that perhaps most consistently employ the motif to which the use of fantasy and folklore frequently gives rise in Sten's work, the underlying yearning among many of his characters to escape their confining material circumstances, to permanently inhabit the realm that is more "sensitive." The first novella, "Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams" is an especially good example of this. Zelik Rifkin, a "less than inspired grocer's assistant" in the Pinch, is chased up a tree one hot summer night as the citizens of the community are sleeping en masse in the park to escape the oppressive conditions in their homes. When he reaches the top of the tree, Rifkin finds himself literally in a dream world, one that gathers up the separate dreams of the slumberers below into a communal projection of their desires and confusions.

Rifkin soon discovers that he can intervene in the collective dreamwork of the Pinch, with the result that where before he was something of an outcast in the community, he now becomes its most celebrated member. Of course, such a state of affairs cannot last long, even in regions of the imagination. When the weather turns, Rifkin no longer has access to his dream world and is eventually returned to his previous lowly stature. The novella's conclusion, however, skips ahead one year to another heat wave and, in a gesture that reiterates the story's case for our overwhelming need for imaginative release, Stern follows Rifkin back up his tree of dreams--where his "outmoded self" apparently meets its demise and his spiritually transformed counterpart "stroll[s] off into the thick of things."

Alhough Zelik Rifkin's action borders on escapism--something that might perhaps be said of Stern's fiction itself--he is nonethless determined to participate, albeit only in a world beyond the treetops, rather than look on passively as others live their hopeless lives. This effort makes him a hero of sorts, able to perceive a choice between an expanded consciousness and a constricting reality. Stern's otherworldly narratives enact a similar choice, offering an expanded awareness of imaginative possibilities while redefining reality in their own terms.

In the last five years, Stern has to some extent expanded his own ambitions, producing two novels that span both geography and time to create multi-stranded narratives the separate strands of which contribute to a broader perspective on both Jewish and American history. Both have at their core a fantasy narrative that, as in most of Stern's short stories, unfold as if the fantastic premise is merely an odd stitch in the fabric of reality. Both offer variations on Saul Bozoff's reintegration with the Jewish past, further emphasized in The Angel of Forgetfulness by the literal return of Saul Bozoff as a character, while The Frozen Rabbi also employs a supernatural occurence as the device that triggers the rediscovery of roots.

In The Angel of Forgetfulness, Saul is a college student in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The Angel of Forgetfulness--written by Nathan Hart, Keni's long-dead lover. The rest of the novel alternates between Saul's subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven. The Angel of Forgetfulness is thus, like "Saul Bozoff and the Ghost," a directly metafictional work, a story about storytelling and the reading of stories, even as it uses its metafictional frame to evoke the history of American Jewish settlement and struggle. These twin ambitions--to acknowledge the mediation of narrative artifice in the pursuit of an authentic rendering of historical experience--are accomplished as well and as directly in The Angel of Forgetfulness as in any other of Stern's stories or novels. The reader who would like to experience Stern's strategy of summoning the real through the free embrace of artifice would be well advised to start with this novel.

The Frozen Rabbi, Stern's most recent novel (2010), is also a typical blend of authentic detail and fabulation, but the specifically metafictional element in it is less pronounced (and less effective). Structured through alternating third-person accounts of Bernie Karp, a boy living in Memphis, and the history of his family's migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, the novel does interpolate a memoir written by one member of the family, but the device is mostly used simply to move the story along, and ultimately very little emphasis is placed on the power of storytelling to transform a colorless reality. This is not in itself a flaw in the novel, but it does put more of a burden on the decontextualized fantasy device with which the novel begins, as Bernie discovers a literal frozen rabbi stowed away in a basement freezer. It turns out that the rabbi has been in this state for over a century.

The rabbi's presence immediately exerts a great influence on Bernie Karp, who begins to familiarize himself with the mystical tradtion the rabbi represents and of which Bernie knows nothing. (He is barely aware of himself as a Jew.) Otherwise, the fact that a cryogenically preserved Hasidic rabbi has suddenly appeared is not much noted. It is not unusual in Stern's fiction that wondrous events manifest themselves as if they are part of the natural course of things, but in The Frozen Rabbi the rather swift way in which the Rabbi adjusts himself to his new circumstances and Bernie regards him as simply his potential teacher creates a curiously flat effect--curious because Stern's fiction is usually nothing if not lively in its narrative momentum. In what seems like no time--with detours to the second narrative--Bernie Karp has become something of an adept at Kabbalah and Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr has succumbed to the temptations of American consumer culture, eventually refashioning himself as a kind of New Age spiritual leader and opening up his own House of Englightenment.

Perhaps what makes this two-fold conversion seem seem thinly dramatized is not so much the rapidity with which it occurs but the fairly obvious satirical purpose to which it is put. Satire is not really a mode much pursued in Stern's previous work, which is comic but does not engage in mockery for the purpose of social correction or criticism. Stern's comedy is vaudevillian, schtick-laden. While Rabbi Eliezer's metamorphosis into a religious huckster is humorous enough, the accompanying "commentary" implicit in his transformation--America has become a place where true spiritual values are lost to greed and self-obsession--overrides the pleasure we might take in the sheer silliness of it. Since Eliezer's decline is paralleled with Bernie Karp's ascent (literally, as it turns out) into spiritual awareness, the contrast between the spiritual journies undertaken by each becomes overly schematic. In his review of The Frozen Rabbi, Mark Athitakis corectly notes that Stern's comedy here "is to a purpose," that "Stern is drawing a bright line between religious commitment in the past and commitment in the present," but that line seems too bright to me. It obscures Stern's more discreet skills of subtlety and suggestion.

Thus the comedy in The Frozen Rabbi struggles for expression in the shadow of its earnest attempts to expose the misplaced values of American society and to document the hardships of Jewish history. This attenuated humor (at least in comparison to Stern's previous work) is perhaps a direct consequence of the novel's very attempt to provide an historical saga, however fragmented it is by the dual narrative strategy Stern employs. The prose style of The Frozen Rabbi seems to me more reliant on extended exposition and overt psychologizing than The Angel of Forgetfulness, which also provides an historical frame but is not preoccupied with moving the story forward, or Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, which settles for evoking one particular time and place (and which is a first-person narrative anyway). This is not to say that The Frozen Rabbi always fails too offer Stern's comedic riffs and trenchant prose, as can be seen in this description of Rabbi Eliezer's place of business:

The New House of Englightement was situated in a stadium-size structure surrounded by crepe myrtle and lilac, atop a knoll carpeted in shaggy grass slabs like an igloo made of turf. Originally a Baptist tabernacle whose pastor had fallen from grace in a sex-for-prayer scandal, the hulking, flying-saucer shaped building had undergone few alterations since changing hands. Coming upon the place through the humid morning haze, Bernie found himself transposing it in his mind to the Temple Mount in Jersusalem, with the rabbi's followers dragging trussed and bleating animals up its steps for sacrifice. There was a big sign out front of the type that ordinarily proclaimed Jesus as Lord, its changeable letters now declaring Live Already Like The Day Is Here!

Passages like this make Steve Stern's fiction a great joy to read, and if The Frozen Rabbi perhaps features somewhat fewer of them (or if its structure and scope dilutes their impact), it is still a more dynamic and imaginative work of fiction than most of what is currently made available by American publishers.

Contextualized Naturalism: The Artfulness of Russell Banks's Affliction

(As a pdf)

Perhaps because American fiction has always been especially animated by the opposing tendencies toward realism on the one hand and fabulation on the other, toward the "novel" as developed in Europe and toward what Hawthorne insisted was "romance," writers' allegiances to either of these modes often seem as much the real subject of their work as the characters and situations that are ostensibly its focus. Whether a writer is attempting earnestly to capture "life as it's lived" or instead to highlight the difference between fiction and life seems to have a manifest salience more pronounced than in European fiction. Among contemporary American fiction writers, the centrality of the relationship to one or the other of these approaches is often especially noteworthy as a kind of intervention into an existing tradition to which the writer in effect declares him/herself an adherent. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is the case of a writer who appears to shift allegiances, whose work comes to exemplify the very tendency it has previously resisted.

Such a writer is Russell Banks, who commenced his career producing experimental fables and metafictions such as Family Life (1974) and Hamilton Stark (1978) but who with Continental Drift (1985) began writing the increasingly realist and naturalist novels by which he is now most widely known. One might interpret Banks’s “conversion” as either a repudiation of the experimental—or “postmodern”—practices of the 1960s and 1970s in American fiction or as affirmation of the realist/naturalist/ mode as exemplified by Norris, Dreiser, or Steinbeck, but while I believe that Banks does present his later work as a reinscription of sorts of the naturalist tradition, it is no so obvious that this entails an outright repudiation of the nonrealist strategies he himself used in his fiction of the preceding period. The stories told and the devices used in such books as Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter (1991), and Rule of the Bone (1995) are undoubtedly more transparent then those in most of the books from Searching for Survivors, Banks’s first book, to The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983), but it seems altogether implausible that such a break from past assumptions about the function of prose narrative would be a complete one, and, indeed, Banks’s neo-naturalist novels frequently enough employ techniques that complicate the relationship between reality and its representation in fiction, that in effect bracket the strategies of naturalism as aesthetic strategies without ever being quite so intrusive as to deflect attention away from the characters or the emotional “content” of the stories being told about them.

Affliction (1987) may be the post-postmodern Banks novel that most fully and most effectively illustrates this hybrid form of naturalism. It offers a portrayal of character, setting, and incident that is arguably closest to “classic” naturalist narrative and that evokes a genuinely affecting “world” recognizable as our own in its pain and suffering. One can read the novel entirely for the traditional rewards of character and plot, remaining mostly unaware of the devices the author employs to contextualize the characters and the story within an existing tradition. But attention to the role of these devices in mediating our response can introduce a degree of contingency to that response, an awareness of context that makes it—the relationship between this narrative and the ancestor narratives that give it an extra resonance—part of the novel’s conceptual canvas. An enhanced appreciation of Affliction both as the story of the downfall of its rural, working-class protagonist, despite his best intentions, and as the story of this story as one of the sort favored in the tradition of American naturalism becomes possible, even if some or even most readers undoubtedly settle for the first.

In his Twayne U.S. Authors series book on Banks, Robert Niemi also notes the crossing of a literary-modal divide in Banks’s career, but he identifies the two competing practices as “socially conscious fiction” and “avant-garde fiction.” It would be accurate enough to describe the bifurcation in Banks’s fiction in these terms as well, although Niemi conceives of the difference it makes in Banks’s work entirely in terms of “content,” specifically as it arises from “the peculiar and enduring mentality of [the writer’s] social class origins” (ix). According to Niemi, Banks is distinctive as a writer “willing and able to write across social boundaries, one who knows how to dolly back for a revealing long shot of the American class structure in its looming totality” (x). In my view, this is much too narrow a conception of the stakes involved in Russell Banks’s transition to “social” fiction, which are as much aesthetic as they are thematic. While it is true that some writers adopted literary naturalism as a way of writing “socially conscious fiction”—Steinbeck and Farrell, for example—to maintain that the first generation of naturalists—Norris, Dreiser, Crane—wrote a kind of fiction that can be adequately characterized as primarily a form of social commentary seems to me to unnecessarily restrict both realism and naturalism to their most obvious documentary functions.

Furthermore, to claim that the acuity of its “social observations” adequately accounts for Affliction’s narrative power, that it achieves this power most importantly through Banks’s ability to “dolly back for a revealing long shot of the American class structure,” would be equally simplistic. Banks takes the novels of Dreiser and Norris as his touchstones, not those of Steinbeck and Farrell, and like Sister Carrie and McTeague, Affliction is concerned with more than the “class structure” that circumscribes its protagonist’s life possibilities, however much those possibilities are circumscribed by forces beyond his control, or even his comprehension. As such scholars as Donald Pizer and Michael Davitt Bell have illustrated, “naturalism” was for the first American writers to adopt it an intensification of realism that allowed them to get even closer to “reality” by revealing its constituent forces observable only in the way they work themselves out through narrative. The nature of these forces is portrayed in the major naturalist novels as broadly philosophical, strongly biological, partly psychological, unavoidably sociological, but certainly not centered on the “American class structure in its looming totality,” in the politicized terms advanced by Niemi.

All of these factors underlie as well the portrayal of Wade Whitehouse and his misaligned fate in Affliction, although no one of them fully accounts for Wade’s troubled life. On the philosophical level, Wade seems to be caught up in a cycle of decline, an irresistible descent into deeper irrelevance and the diminution of his sense of himself as a man it entails. If this is not necessarily his pre-ordained fate, once the assorted misfortunes—Wade’s divorce and his subsequent estrangement from his daughter, his exclusion from the investigation into an “accidental” hunting accident (Wade is the town’s part time police officer), which leads to further sleights to his authority, the death of his mother and the rekindling of father-son conflict it provokes—begin to press fully on Wade with their interlocking weight, the unrelenting pressure to which he ultimately succumbs begins to seem deliberately directed toward him as part of some preestablished plan rather than simple bad luck. Wade Whitehouse’s claim to his place in the universe is being cancelled.

To some extent (and Banks is actually rather courageous in framing Wade’s dilemma so squarely in these terms at a time when “masculinity” is at best an embattled concept), Wade is portrayed explicitly as a man whose sense of his own masculinity is under assault and whose response to the diminishment of his role as father and ostensible authority figure is largely an instinctual one, the result of biological and psychological imperatives over which Wade has no effective control. That Wade wants to be a good father to his daughter seems readily apparent, but he also seems to have no plausible conception of how to do this, and his fumbling efforts to maintain a connection with her only exacerbates the problem and fuels Wade’s increasing desperation. Similarly, Wade’s already dubious status as the town’s lone policeman is further eroded through his interactions with Gordon La Riviere, town bigwig and Wade’s boss, and with Mel Gordon, who defies Wade’s attempt to cite him for a traffic offense and who, along with La Riviere, Wade believes is involved in arranging the hunting accident that killed union boss Evan Twombley, Gordon’s father-in-law. His frustration with these challenges to his masculine self-image, although never exactly expressed by the narrator directly, again leads him to self-destructive actions he seemingly can no longer avoid.

Before Wade Whitehouse descends irretrievably into his final rage, however, he experiences another unwelcome reminder of his precarious place in the world of masculine power relations. His mother’s death is a traumatic enough event, but ultimately its most damaging effect on Wade is that it draws him more closely into his now widowed father’s orbit, which revives old animosities and elemental conflicts from Wade’s violence-laden childhood. Not only was Wade’s father prone to alcohol-stoked outbursts of violence against Wade and his older brothers, but the atmosphere of dread and intimidation he created clearly hasn’t dissipated, either in Wade’s continuing encounters with him or in the shadow it has cast over Wade’s life in general. Wade makes the mistake of assuming more responsibility for his father following on his mother’s death—for which in his negligence Glenn Whitehouse is mostly to blame—and this renewed proximity only brings the long-simmering hatreds and resentments between them to the ultimate conflagration of the novel’s conclusion. Wade’s own incipient capacity to inflict great violence, whether inbred or conditioned by the destructive environment in which he had to live, can no longer be contained as he kills his father and sets the body alight, then shoots the man he suspects of carrying out the hit on Evan Twombley, Wade’s own ostensible best friend, Jack Hewitt.

It is certainly possible to see in the disaster of Wade Whitehouse’s life sociological ramifications of various kinds, to take Wade’s life as a case study in working-class frustration or rural decline, but to focus first of all and most directly on the sociological in Affliction is to fail to understand Banks’s ambitions as a novelist, which, to judge only by his previous work, incorporates the social but doesn’t begin or end there. Bank’s work has consistently been characterized by a more than cursory attention to form and style, a reluctance to settle for a single formal strategy or stylistic signature. Works as diverse as Hamilton Stark, Continental Drift, The Relation of My Imprisonment, and, following Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone, are united in their apparent determination to try out different narrative strategies and points of view, as well as the various stylistic performances appropriate to such strategies and perspectives. It is apparent enough that Banks has a “subject”—life as lived by working-class people in the American northeast—to which he regularly returns, but over the long run this subject really functions more as the means to a series of aesthetic variations than as an obsessive effort to produce “social fiction.”

The naturalist narrative can thus be seen as one such variation. Banks attempts to adapt the form to the circumstances obtaining in the rural northeast rather than Chicago, San Francisco, or the Bowery of New York, and to the changes in literary sensibility that have ensued between the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th. Even critics who aren’t otherwise happy with those changes, who hold up a writer like Banks as one who sustains the possibility of social realism, tend to acknowledge that Affliction isn’t simply a re-animation of 19th century realism. Niemi refers to Banks as a “postmodern naturalist” (151). Fred Pfeil, who describes Banks’s early as “pointlessly obsessed with narrational experiment” and “formalistically hollow,” nevertheless finds that in Affliction “Banks avoids the twin dangers of a mere ‘sociological’ accuracy on the one hand, and a voyeuristic sensationalism on the other, through a wise combination of elevating and distancing techniques” Pfeil associates with Brecht (77). Pfeil believes these techniques are used to strengthen the novel’s political resonance through avoiding sentimentality, but at the same time, the very devices Banks employs to create the novel’s “distancing effects” make Pfeil object to its narrative strategy as too intrusive.

One of the ways in which Banks alters the inherited narrative method of naturalism is to assign the narration of Wade Whitehouse’s story to another character involved in that story, Wade’s younger brother, Rolfe. Although Rolfe is thus technically a first-person narrator, for the most part he relates the story from a removed and detached perspective, presenting his narrative as the result of his own research into his brother’s disappearance and the circumstances preceding it. The narrative thus assumes the tone of a carefully arranged chronicle—Rolfe is himself a history teacher—that also allows Rolfe to occasionally pause and interject a kind of free-floating, philosophical reflection reminiscent of the authorial commentary in, say, Sister Carrie, but, since it originates in the character’s discourse, more suitably integrated into the narrative proper:

. . .in the fifteen years since I last spent a Halloween [in Lawford], which is to say, since I was in high school, the place has not changed much. In fifty years it has not changed much. But visualizing the place, going there in memory or imagination, is not something I care to do. I studiously avoid it. I have to be almost tricked into it or conjured. Lawford is one of those towns that people leave, not one that people come back to. And to make matters worse, to make it even more difficult to return to, even if you wanted to go back—which of course no one who has left the town in this half century wants to do—those who remain behind cling stubbornly as barnacles to the bits and shards of social rites that once invested their lives with meaning: they love bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, funerals, seasonal and national holidays, even election days. Halloween, as well. A ridiculous holiday, and for whom, for what? It has absolutely no connection to modern life. (5)

Pfeil asserts that passages such as this mar the novel’s otherwise “splendid narration”: “Suddenly, the beautifully pitched detachment of the rest of the novel turns into portentous, unpersuasive flailing” (80). But it is hard to accept that the novel could exhibit a “splendid narration” at the same time it’s narrator is “flailing” and is someone the reader cannot “believe in or care about. . .as an individual character whenever he is roped into the plot” (80). Pfeil believes that “for the most part. . .we can forget he’s supposed to be the source of what we read” (80), but this can hardly be the case. How can we forget that the voice narrating the story of Wade Whitehouse is Wade’s brother, who has shared some of Wade’s formative experiences but who has lived apart from Wade for long enough that Wade has himself become mostly just a voice on the telephone? How can we forget that this vexed relationship substantially determines both the portrayal of Wade and his environment and the manner in which Rolfe relates these particulars?

Pfeil wants Banks to have written a novel whose point of view represents “an expository near-omniscience” (78), but this is not in fact the novel Banks has written. There are indeed many extended passages in which Rolfe narrates the action in the “studiously detached” way Pfeil thinks is appropriate to the Brechtian social fiction he wishes Affliction to be, but it seems at the least rather inconsistent to celebrate this mode of narration when it appears to be what it isn’t—a disembodied third-person narration—but to condemn it when it reveals its actual source in a potentially unreliable narrator. Pfeil asserts that he is unable to believe that “Rolfe can know all he’s saying or [can] execute this masterful narration” (80), but this fails to account for the possibility that Banks wants us to question whether his narrator “can know all he’s saying,” or at least to consider that the mode of narration presented to us is itself relevant to our perception of the narrative. Surely a writer of Russell Banks’s skills would not deliberately undermine his “masterful narration” by substituting “unpersuasive flailing” for no apparent reason.

Robert Niemi is more tolerant of Rolfe’s role in assembling and relating the text that is Affliction, noting that “without his mediation Wade’s story would surely lose psychological and moral depth” (161). But Niemi is closer to identifying Rolfe’s most essential task when he observes that Affliction is “a meticulous narrative reconstruction of a subject that is absent from the outset” (151). One could say that the novelist a “reconstruction” insofar as Rolfe has pieced together as much information as he can gather and presented it to us as a coherent narrative. However, it is precisely that the story concerns “a subject that is absent from the outset” that makes Rolfe’s version more than a “reconstruction.” In his brother’s absence, both from the current scene altogether and in effect from Rolfe’s life since he went away to college, Rolfe is as much constructing as reconstructing Wade’s story, imagining Wade himself as much as simply documenting his actions. Rolfe’s “meticulous” style of narration only and additionally highlights Rolfe’s sense of himself as an author patiently putting together what he hopes will be a compelling narrative that stands up to scrutiny as a verbal construction, apart from the opportunity it provides Rolfe to reflect on his brother’s decline and fall.

It is entirely consistent with our experience of Rolfe’s narration to say that he represents a muted version of the self-reflexive narrator to be found in metafiction. Rolfe interrupts the story from time to time, calls attention to his meticulously constructed narrative, precisely in order to remind us that an objective, omniscient rendering of the final days of Wade Whitehouse is not possible, that not even Wade’s brother knows him well enough to give us an unquestionably accurate portrait of him. We do not encounter the “real” Wade Whitehouse in Affliction because the real Wade Whitehouse is ultimately a stranger to Rolfe and we must make do with the Wade Rolfe is able to conjure from his “research” and his own memory. The only way in which Rolfe Whitehouse is able to invoke his older brother Wade is to make of him a fictional character that can then be seen to manifest those qualities and influences Rolfe believes might explain Wade’s actions.

This does not mean that we respond to Wade Whitehouse as something other than a recognizably “human” character into whose circumstances we can imaginatively project ourselves as readers without having our attention explicitly turned away from Wade’s dilemma and toward the means of representing that dilemma. Ignoring the means of representing Wade and his story does seem to me a willful denial of the relative complexity of Affliction’s narrative scheme, but the novel is certainly not metafictional to the extent that we must suspend our belief in the representational illusion Banks still wants us to maintain. The novel is about Wade Whitehouse, not about its own status as fiction (although its status as fiction can appropriately be considered), and our response to Wade can be as complicated as our response to actual human beings. Indeed, an important measure of the success of Affliction would have to be precisely the degree to which we do finish the novel feeling some combination of compassion and horror toward Wade, regarding him as a human being in all of his multifarious and often contradictory traits and behaviors. Any consideration of form, style, or narrative technique would for most readers be a way of extending our perception of this character, not of reflecting on the artifice of fiction-making.

Banks’s variations on the naturalist plot and naturalist narrative method in my view make Affliction a more artful novel than most of those written by the proto-naturalists, but must its art be an obstacle to a full engagement with the characters that art helps bring to life? One of the consequences of Rolfe’s self-regulating narration is that by the time Rolfe himself steps out as an active character to attend his mother’s funeral, he has already impressed himself on us as a character whose struggle to understand the forces shaping his brother’s life is also the attempt to understand the forces shaping his own. Among the strongest of these forces is the formative influence exerted by Glenn Whitehouse, a character most readers must experience as unpleasant in the extreme but who is nevertheless portrayed with a bestial immediacy that eliminates all distance between readers and characters, making the artifice of character-creation seem a trivial consideration. Yet it is of course the “meticulous” way in which Banks has employed such artifice that builds these characters into the memorable figures they are, just as his equal skill in the elaboration of plot and evocation of setting works to create the very sense of realism in Affliction that critics such as Fred Pfeil value in it most highly.

If Affliction calls more attention to its own artful construction than Sister Carrie or McTeague, it is also finally more convincing as a representation of both character and setting, as well as more credible as a narrative depicting true-to-life events than either of these novels. However compelling they are in their unrelenting adherence to their own narrative logic, neither of them can really described as telling stories that are altogether plausible as realistic reflections of ordinary life. Both could accurately be called melodramas, even if the melodrama mostly succeeds in supporting some pretty substantial thematic weight, and both have fairly obvious stylistic limitations of a kind that only intensifies the melodramatic effects, finally calling attention to the storytelling process even more persistently than does Rolfe Whitehouse’s much less rhetorically embellished style. The invoked worlds of these novels are vividly rendered, but they exist to further the portrayal of characters subject to the influences of “environment” more than they serve as depictions of a setting meant to be aesthetically realized in and for itself in its mundane particulars.

In these precursor narratives, setting is created—in the case of Dreiser, through the accumulation of quite specific detail—in order to provide their characters with a plausible background against which to follow the working-out of their fates. In Affliction, setting is in effect built around and for its characters, as a realm they fully inhabit and that comes to have its own distinct character and integrity. Banks seems more intent on evoking his small New Hampshire town with a comprehensive realism that can itself serve as a focus of aesthetic interest. The environmental influence represented by this community is not just asserted but is revealed through the details and actions the narrative systematically accumulates. At the end of the novel, Rolfe meditates on the changes brought to Lawford in the wake of Wade’s disappearance and the economic exploitation Wade suspected all along was behind the events contributing to his downfall, concluding with the observation that, following the arrival of the new ski resort, “The community as such, no longer exists; Lawford is a thriving economic zone between Littleton and Catamount” (353). The downfall of Lawford and, by analogy, small towns like it in the American northeast, is arguably as much the subject of Affliction as the individual fate of Wade Whitehouse; certainly the degradations to which Lawford is subjected, economic and social, are echoed in those Wade must endure. In this way, the novel doesn’t really succeed unless the portrayal of setting is painstaking and can be regarded as an aesthetic achievement in its own right.

Affliction is a “socially conscious novel,” but it is also an aesthetically conscious one, and the latter level of consciousness seems to me a necessary precondition for the former to be attained. Affliction succeeds because it is most immediately concerned with its own integrity as an aesthetic construction. Rolfe Whitehouse is “meticulous” in his exposition because his creator is meticulous in his use of the narrator’s situation and sensibility to fashion a well-made novel that might attract readers interested at least as much in the art of fiction as in an anatomy of the “American class structure.” Such readers are only more likely to consider the “social” implications of fiction that seeks to realizes some purely aesthetic ambitions, that first of all withstands scrutiny as literary art. Social “relevance” in fiction arises as a resonant effect of narratives that are compelling in their storytelling, the execution of which is the writer’s first obligation. “Relevance” is a quality a work of fiction possesses in addition to it primary achievement as a credible aesthetic creation, at least if the author of the work hopes it will survive its motivating but transient “subject.”

Affliction will survive into the next generation of readers because Russell Banks is able to make the novel relevant in this way. In the long run it will be valued, I believe, for its perfectly-paced storytelling and skillful deployment of point of view, for its formal appropriation of the naturalist narrative such that what was a loosely connected set of realist narratives embodying, in various degrees of novelistic skill, a determinist worldview becomes freshly shaped into a preeminently skillful narrative that could be described as distilling the common tendencies of literary naturalism into a kind of quintessential form. It will be valued for the “relevance” of its story about the vulnerabilities of rural communities and abiding effects of male rage, to be sure. However, since these vulnerabilities are not likely to decrease any time soon—if anything, they are more likely to increase as such communities continue to become less self-sustaining—and since the pressures contributing to male impulsive behavior will also probably remain in force, Affliction will be most relevant to the interests of readers who read fiction for its engagement with abiding dilemmas and persistent conflicts rather than ephemeral “issues.”

These readers may not perceive an untraversable breach between Banks’s “formalistic” early work and his later social realism. Banks did not simply cease showing concern for form and technique and start focusing instead on “content,” on producing “social fiction.” He continued to be occupied with the effects of form through the twinning of narrative strands in Continental Drift, with the influence of voice and point of view in Rule of the Bone and The Sweet Hereafter. In Affliction, he is self-conscious about form to the extent that he has appropriated the naturalist narrative and attempted to give it more aesthetically elegant shape. He has incorporated into this novel some of the self-reflexivity associated with postmodernism but does so by amplifying the self-awareness exhibited by his otherwise in-frame narrator. In neither case, however, does he force the reader to be self-conscious about the artifice employed or about the reader’s own role in the game of suspending disbelief. Ultimately, Affliction shows Russell Banks not so much rejecting the aestheticism of his early fiction as tempering it, using it to create a work of fiction whose artfulness does not eclipse substance but makes it possible in the first place.

 

Works Cited

 

Banks, Russell. Affliction. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tale: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. London: Verso, 1990.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1966.

Postmodern Fiction and Academic Criticism

(As a pdf)

I

A Period of Transition

Since courses in "contemporary literature" became respectable additions to the university curriculum, the corresponding scholarly books on the subject have assumed a few recognizable forms, each of which have inevitable limitations for such books' survival as the kind of long-term contribution to "knowledge" academic scholarship is expected to provide. In this respect, the turn to theory in academic criticism has perhaps been beneficial to the study of contemporary literature, at least within the confines of academe itself, as it brings a stability and an established context to the study of writers who in most cases are still developing careers and whose work is thus subject to at best incomplete examination. For better or worse, academic criticism of contemporary fiction and poetry that endeavors primarily to survey or illuminate this work for its immediate literary value, or even for its broader cultural relevance, has provided only partial insights while risking the possibility of its own ultimate obsolescence.

A staple of all academic criticism is the single-author study, and such scholarly works on still-active writers have played a significant role in the "field" of contemporary literature. (Among other ways in which this field struggles against an unstable object of study is implicit in its very designation: Many of the writers on whom much of the early academic work on contemporary literature was focused are no longer contemporary, of course, and any subsequent criticism of their fiction (the book ultimately under scrutiny here examines fiction) will need to assign it to some other category, while newer writers become "contemporary.") The publication of a critical book surveying an author's extant body of work or exploring the author's habitual themes and methods generally signaled that the author in question had earned a place in the still-evolving canon of writers included on the syllabi of courses in contemporary fiction and thus deserved the extended treatment of a single-author volume. By now, such series as the Twayne U.S. Authors books and the "Understanding. . ." studies published by the University of South Carolina Press have made this sort of book much more commonplace, but in the development of academic criticism considering contemporary fiction it fulfilled an important function establishing an at least informal roster of writers worthy of academic attention.

Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.

If single-author studies of contemporary writers threaten to become historical curiosities or episodes in the history of literary theory, another genre of critical book, the multi-text survey, aims for a more enduring utility it can only partially provide. Multi-text surveys actually come in several different sizes and varieties, ranging from the most all-inclusive historical surveys such as Frederick Karl's American Fictions 1940-1980to more focused surveys such as Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 or Robert Rebein's Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. What they have in common is a kind of topographical ambition to lay out the land occupied by contemporary fiction, to create and preserve a map of the practices and accomplishments of "current" writers in such a way that something like "knowledge" results, although it is a knowledge of trends and movements more than of individual writers and their bodies of work. Whether the trends and movements deemed significant upon the publication of these books will still be perceived as such when the currency of the analysis no longer obtains is of course uncertain, even if the more ambitious of such books seek to influence, even fix, future perceptions of what counts as important in this era of literary history. Certainly the more perspicacious of the multi-text surveys may still retain value for readers interested in a synoptic view of that era, to which all critical and historical accounts would contribute, but only the passage of time is going to allow some degree of settled judgment about the relative importance of the various practices that for now remain unavoidably contingent.

Some of these surveys take an approach that perhaps potentially reduces such contingency, but in assuming the form they do they risk becoming less studies of fiction per se and more examinations of social forces or cultural expressions. Coming with such titles as Insanity and Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction, and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, these books treat a selection of contemporary fiction thematically, through the application of a framing concept, generally of the author's own devising. The framing concept is advanced as offering a special insight into the nature of the subject texts, both individually and when considered in relation to one another. In most cases, such books avoid making overarching claims to capturing the essence of these texts, what makes them individually unique. At their best, they offer a perspective on the selected texts that can be considered alongside others and in that way help to demonstrate that those so considered are works that reward sustained attention.

Joseph M. Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fictionbelongs within this line of conceptual criticism. It is one of the numerous studies of American postmodern fiction that attempts to account for the postmodern in fiction by focusing on a particular formal quality or philosophical orientation that further specifies what makes a "postmodern" text distinctive beyond the vaguely radical connotation generally associated with the term. In this book Conte proposes a dual impulse in certain postmodern texts, toward on the one hand the disintegration of presumed order, both in the world and as the world is represented in fiction, and on the other toward the cultivation of an emergent order out of the disorder these texts faithfully render. "Design" is thus as much a defining feature of postmodern fiction as the "debris" of contemporary life this fiction must also acknowledge.

Postmodernism has proven to be probably the most examined phenomenon in postwar American fiction. Not only were postmodern authors and practices ("postmodern" as we now retrospectively apply the term, at least) more or less at the center of scholarly interest in contemporary fiction for the first decade or so after its acceptance as an academic field of study, but even now, more than four decades after its emergence as literature's contribution to the "radical" cultural movements of the 1960s, postmodernism continues to engage the interest of academic critics. While some such critics are more interested in postmodernism as a cultural orientation than specifically as an approach to the writing of fiction, Comte belongs among those who have attempted to delineate the radicalism of postmodern fiction in its departure from conventional modes of representation and its concomitant intensification of modernist formal experiment by examining the radical literary strategies at work in postmodern texts.

Comte focuses on both what must now be called canonical postmodernist novels such as De Lillo's White Noise, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as well as less-discussed works such as John Hawkes's Travesty, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Pack of Lies. Travesty is Comte's first and most compelling example in fleshing out his claim ("design and debris," in fact, is a phrase taken from this novel), and it is one of his book's chief virtues that it brings this welcome attention to Hawkes, whose work may represent, in such books as The Beetle Leg, The Goose on the Grave, and The Lime Twig, the earliest appearance of what would later be characterized as postmodernism and whose body of work as a whole stands as one of the greatest achievements in postwar American fiction. He has become an unduly neglected figure in the consideration of literary postmodernism, and Comte's discussion of Travesty demonstrates Hawkes's centrality to this phenomenon.

According to Comte, "As a postmodern novelist, Hawkes does not shrink before the proposition of 'unmaking' or decreative force; he extols the complementarity of the two terms; and finally, he proposes the existence of an orderly disorder." Travesty "illustrates the tenuousness of authoritarian control as it slips into madness, the fragility of pattern as it dissolves into irregularity; and it proposes the revelation of some hidden order in the scatter of random occurrences, some more profound design within the welter of chaos" (42). This seems an accurate description of the thematic burden of Travesty, although the extent to which the "design and debris" strategy informs the novel's own formal design is not really explored very fully. One could argue that Hawkes's dictum that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme" committed him to a design and debris aesthetic by which Hawkes reconstituted fiction from the shards of convention through what he called "totality of vision or structure." Unfortunately, Comte confines his discussion of design and debris to the thematic exposition of its salience as revealed in the "design" of its main character, who is driving a car hurtling at high speed toward an inevitable crash, and who discusses his intentions with his captive passengers. From Comte's analysis, one might conclude that Travesty's narrative manifests "design and debris" allegorically, but not that Hawkes has fundamentally altered the formal assumptions of fiction in a way that is distinctively "postmodern."

If critical examination of postmodern fiction has in general exhibited a bias that distorts our perception of postmodern, experimental fiction and prevents full appreciation of its expressed qualities, it would be a bias toward the thematic, broadly philosophical implications that can be drawn from it. Most academic critics of postmodern fiction celebrate its antifoundational or "subversive" qualities, its capacity to incorporate cutting-edge critical theories and new ideas in science or epistemology, but rarely do they attend predominantly to the purely aesthetic consequences of postmodernism's various dismantlings of narrative convention. While the debris of inherited form lies in the wake of postmodern strategies, "design" is also an ultimate product of those strategies. Form is not discarded--putting aside the question of whether any work of fiction could be truly formless--but instead made more elastic, often through highlighting "form" as a specific issue of concern within the text itself. The real legacy of American postmodern fiction will be a demonstrable expansion of the the range of possible formal variations of which fiction is capable beyond even the initial expansion of those possibilities achieved by the modernists, and more analyses of how a writer such as John Hawkes contributed to this legacy are needed.

The fiction of Kathy Acker also seems especially illustrative of a postmodern strategy of design and debris, and Comte does examine Empire of the Senselessin the context of its radical formal iconoclasm. As Comte notes, "Acker can be expected to disregard the traditional rules of fiction" (56). Her work employs discontinuity, collage and parody in a way that makes it an exemplar of Hawkes's dismissal of "the true enemies of fiction" almost as provocative as Hawkes's own; in some instances it is even more thoroughgoing in its rejection of narrative coherence. Unfortunately, Comte chooses to put most of his emphasis on the way Acker's iconoclasm serves an ulterior political purpose, insisting that "the scumbling of levels of discourse in the novel reflects Acker's anarchistic methodology, undermining the reader's presuppositions of dominant-intellectual and subordinate-proletarian cultural positions" (59). It is hard to deny that Kathy Acker included among her ambitions the desire to upend the "patriarchal order," but to whatever extent her fiction attracts future readers it will be because of its "anarchistic" formal energies, not its analysis of "cultural positions."

That Acker may have been motivated to create her unconventional texts at least in part by the belief they might implicitly undermine class and gender constructions does not ultimately determine how their formal/aesthetic effects will be perceived. As in his discussion of Hawkes, Comte is ultimately more interested in Acker's thematic treatment of "design and debris," concluding that "Acker finds that even in thew domain of anarchy--in nomadic space, after the disruption of the state apparatus, where women ride motorcycles--there must be discipline present" (74). But the real "discipline" Acker brings to her fiction is in the alternate "order" she provides despite the apparent anarchy of her means. Only if, in fact, readers catch on to the design of a work like Empire of the Senseless--unorthodox but nevertheless present--will such a work continue to find its readers. Comte identifies this design as rising from a conceptualism by which "methodology is directly supportive of the concept" animating it, but it is the way in which the reader can discern the relationship between methodology and concept that ultimately gives Acker's fiction its literary interest. Acker's particular application of conceptualism to fiction is what future readers are likely to find compelling about it, while the concept itself will likely come to seem rather reduced in its power to provoke.

Comte does a much more adequate job of accounting for the formally challenging postmodernism of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth, writers Comte identifies as "proceduralists" who "invent forms without knowing the precise manner of text that will be generated" (76). Such works embody design and debris by revealing "an immanent design within their apparently chaotic distribution of materials." The designation "proceduralist" seems most immediately and most accurately applicable to Mathews's fiction, since his association with the Oulipo is well-known and since the Oulipian credo specifically calls for the use of rules and formal constraints in creating literary texts. "Procedural" seems less obviously descriptive of the fiction of Barth and Sorrentino, and Comte usefully examines the way Barth uses "arabesque" in his novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor(and implicitly in other of his books) to create "nested frames" which provide a "recursive symmetry" that organizes the narrative, as well as the way Sorrentino in his Pack of Liestrilogy employs a complex patterning of constraints, some perhaps fully apparent only to Sorrentino, to give the novels a unity that is not conventionally serial. Comte's concluding remarks about Sorrentino aptly capture an essential element of this writer's work:

Sorrentino's conviction that structure can generate content in his fiction relies upon the reciprocal influence between author and text. The author invents the structure of the work, but that structure compels his performance in ways that he had not anticipated. (110-111)

If Comte's discussions of Barth and Sorrentino illuminate qualities of their work that have not previously been as clearly identified, his chapters on White Noise, The Universal Baseball Association and Gravity's Rainbow to some extent retrack old ground in the critical consideration of these novels. Comte uses information theory, systems theory, complexity theory, and the ideas of the mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot to map the design and debris strategy at work in these iconic postmodern texts, and while the readings that result seem perfectly cogent in elucidating that strategy, nothing very fresh is really added to the commentary on the novels themselves beyond what has already been offered in the voluminous existing criticism of them. At best they demonstrate that such works readily lend themselves to a critical approach that is itself "postmodern" in its assumptions and its resources, although in my view their complexity is less a consequence of their concordance with the more abstruse levels of postmodern theory than their capacity to stand up to critical and interpretive scrutiny from a multitude of perspectives and still seem not exhausted in their potential to reveal meaning and provide for a bracing reading experience.

A final chapter attempts to bring the study of postmodern fiction into the digital era, announcing that "The paradigm shift from print to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism" (193). Containing relatively brief analyses of the work of William Gibson, Richard Powers, and De Lillo's Underworld as examples of fiction that "though bound to the present order. . .is provocatively enhanced by an engagement with the terms and conditions of the information age," (199), it essentially reaffirms the accomplishments of the "print order," at least in the form of postmodern fiction, which "offers certain palliatives for. . .symptoms of technological neurasthenia." For Comte

Finally, postmodern fiction offers relief for the "pixelated," those viewers stunned into anomie by the bombardment of pixels--the smallest image-forming units of the video display. It turns out that print on paper still has the capacity to evoke images and ideas as compelling as any we might encounter in the flicker of a screen.

It seems to me that here Comte has stretched the "postmodern" to the limits of its utility as a critical concept. If the "paradigm shift" ushering in digital culture is a "defining aspect of postmodernism," why should it not require the postmodern critic's unhesitating embrace? If Comte is right that what he calls "electronic composition" has not yet produced its "masterly" author, then doesn't this shift mark a break, a period of transition between postmodernism and a new dispensation that will embrace the dominance of the digital? Surely "postmodern" cannot continue to be the designation of choice for describing all literary or philosophical projects that show the world to be more complex, beliefs about it more necessarily relative, than we once imagined. Nor can it indefinitely remain essentially a synonym for "unconventional" or "experimental." Unconventional writers might be motivated simply by the desire to try out alternative strategies, not to seek out those that are already acceptably postmodern as critics and theorists have defined the strategy.

It may be that academic criticism will turn to electronic forms as the subject of "advanced" analysis. This would certainly be more in keeping with the direction academic criticism has taken in the last twenty-five years: away from the consideration of works of literature as a self-sufficient task and toward approaches that enhance the role of academic criticism itself. In the study of contemporary fiction this would mean less emphasis on identifying and examining the most significant writers and works and more or on the cultural and cognitive implications of the electronic medium itself. Literary study, or at least that branch of it devoted to the contemporary, could merge with media study. If present and future writers are to be provided with the same sort of critical attention that has been accorded to the postmodernists, it will probably be necessary that literary criticism be rejuvenated in a form free of institutional requirements. It will require critics once again interested first of all in literature and not in the status of their own critical projects or the interrogation of trends in culture as a whole.

II

At School

In his memoir Keeping Literary Company, Jerome Klinkowitz, who became not long after the events described one of the best-known advocates of “contemporary” fiction, describes his graduate school experience:

At school [Marquette University] I was making my way dutifully through seminars on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, with other courses on Victorian prose writers, modern British poets, and the like. Not until my last semester did I add a couple classes [sic] in American literature, and then turned back to British poetry. . .The twentieth-century novel course I took ended with Hemingway from the 1920s and works by Faulkner and Fitzgerald from the 1930s. (6)

Having at the same time acquired an enthusiasm for the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Klinkowitz further recalls

[that] I stayed with Vonnegut through all this showed both that I could read out of class and that novels like Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat’s Cradle, which I bought as they came back into print, were a world apart from what Marquette taught us was the tradition” (6).

The year in which Klinkowitz is “at school” and engaged in such earnest study of the tradition is 1966, and although it is not exactly surprising to learn that the curriculum to which he was exposed at that time was still so very conservative, for those of us who now think of “contemporary literature” as a flourishing and more or less respectable field of academic study, to be reminded that even in the period most associated with cultural upheaval and literary innovation current writing could not be considered “literature” at all nevertheless might make us pause. At a time when cultural studies, an approach that welcomes not only contemporary literature but all forms of popular culture as well, has become the dominant mode of scholarly analysis in literary study, it might seem especially difficult to countenance a graduate program so hopelessly hidebound as to regard otherwise serious works of fiction or poetry beyond the pale because not sufficiently aged. But Klinkowitz’s account of his subsequent attempts as a professor himself to bring contemporary American fiction—or at least his favored contemporary writers—into the college classroom implicitly reveals how Klinkowitz’s efforts, like those of other “radical young Ph.Ds” who also sought to open up the literature curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s (13), was in its way as conservative a project as that undertaken by Klinkowitz’s professors in creating that curriculum in the first place.

Perhaps the most curious comment in the passages I’ve quoted is Klinkowitz’s affirmation that in maintaining his interest in Vonnegut he “showed. . .that I could read out of class.” Most likely this is simply a loose way of emphasizing the reading demands in class of a graduate literary education, but nevertheless Klinkowitz also draws attention to the fact that in 1966 a graduate student in English would be unable to read novels such as those he lists while “at school.” And, more than anything else, this initial chapter of Keeping Literary Company is a chronicle of Klinkowitz’s success in securing the literature course, as well as literary scholarship, as a suitable dwelling-place for contemporary fiction—to make it acceptable in “school.” By 1969 he has taken a position at Northern Illinois University, where, he writes, “the department was alive with dialogue and debate, especially among the younger crowd who felt so excluded and estranged from the fat-cat professoriate that by virtue of their seniority ran the place. As opposed to these elders, whose taste was settled and whose curriculum was virtually petrified, we assistant professors and instructors were not only reading new works but were struggling to incorporate them in both our value system and our teaching” (13). One would not unfairly conclude from Klinkowitz’s framing of the scene in which his memoir will unfold that the “literary company” he wants to keep is that of the canon of writers deemed worthy of study in the academic curricula of universities.

Klinkowitz is exemplary in describing the process by which many other like-minded critics and scholars helped to make “contemporary literature” a respectable area of academic literary study. What I hope to show in an analysis of some of the more significant works of academic criticism that emerged from and helped to direct and determine this process is that what was presented as a critical advocacy of contemporary writers and an argument for the superior and distinctive qualities of contemporary literature—especially fiction—would be more accurately described as an effort to enhance the status of current writing by calling on the prestige and authority of the academy. These are decidedly distinct endeavors, and the predominance of the second has had, I will also maintain, several important and related effects. It has, most significantly, aggrandized the academy rather than contemporary writing itself, expanding its prerogatives to include becoming de facto arbiter of critical opinion about the merits and the direction of contemporary literature, a development the further unfortunate consequence of which has been that literary criticism outside the purview of academe has virtually ceased to exist. It has distorted criticism of all kinds, but especially criticism of recent fiction and poetry, by erasing distinctions between criticism per se and the historical, theoretical, and political projects to which it has increasingly and inevitably become subordinate. And, along with the parallel burgeoning of university-based creative writing programs, the successful establishment of contemporary literature as an academic field of study has in turn failed both to cultivate a more informed audience for contemporary writing and to foster in any credible or consistent way a more fertile critical environment in which such writing could take place. It could be argued, in fact, that the increasingly close association between the academy and contemporary literature has turned out for the latter to be more detrimental than not.

Klinkowitz’s own professed enthusiasms point to an implicit conflict of priorities that, upon reflection, would seem likely to make this association an uneasy one, if not unavoidably to produce the kind of results I have just described. Not all “new” and “experimental” writers were equally welcome on Klinkowitz’s pathbreaking syllabus. John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, for example, are dismissed—along with modernism in general—for their “philosophic intricacies and intellectual pyrotechnics,” their “obfuscation and soul-killing technicalism” (7). Clearly Klinkowitz finds these writers too “academic” in comparison with Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and Ken Kesey, whose books he is most eager to bring to his students’ attention. It is, then, at the very least unclear why he found it necessary to engage in such a struggle to bring the study of these writers into the academic curriculum, where almost unavoidably even the more technically transparent satirical and Beat-oriented fiction he wanted to champion would be subject to a kind of critical scrutiny that would itself be hard-pressed to avoid “philosophic intricacies” and “intellectual pyrotechnics.” (Klinkowitz’s own account of how he came to understand what Vonnegut was really up to in Mother Night is, in fact, impressively intricate.) One might even conclude that there is a palpable incoherence built into the project of securing the approval of the institution of academic literary study for fiction that advertises itself as unconventional and “disruptive.”

To some extent, of course, contemporary fiction (understood as fiction published since World War II by writers not already known from the prewar period) was, even during Klinkowitz’s time as a graduate student, not altogether absent from the university curriculum or from academic discussion. Klinkowitz received his own Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin, where the English department was known for its receptivity to the study of contemporary writing, including its publication of the journal Contemporary Literature (Klinkowitz 6). Tony Tanner points out in a prefatory note to City of Words, published in 1971, that this book’s origins lay in a number of seminars on contemporary literature held in several different American universities. But if one is to judge from the first few important academic studies of contemporary fiction (including City of Words), most such consideration of contemporary writers was done within the disciplinary domain of existing fields of academic study, most often as a further development in “modern’ literature broadly conceived or, especially, as part of the relatively new fields of American Literature and its close cousin, American Studies.

The influence of all of these scholarly “areas” can be seen in the first two widely-cited scholarly studies of postwar American fiction, Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence (1961) and Marcus Klein’s After Alienation (1965). More so than the sedate and airless seminars on “Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. . .and the like,” the kind of high-minded but intellectually less inhibited critical study represented by these two books was the earliest prevailing model of the scholarly analysis of postwar American fiction by which, and against which, contemporary literature would become the object of serious academic examination, and ultimately not just an acceptable if isolated course offered by the English department but itself an area of duly organized literary study in which one could ultimately become a certified “specialist.” By no means musty and pedantic, bound to no obvious critical orthodoxy, both books enthusiastically embrace contemporary writing and attempt to explicate then-recent fiction, as well as enliven their own examination of this fiction, by placing it very much within the main currents of the literary, historical, and intellectual developments of the mid-twentieth century.

Which is not to say they are not thoroughly “academic” in both intent and effect. Considering that if there was a reigning critical orthodoxy at the time these books were written it was New Critical formalism, one might expect them to show the influence of this method, but their origin in academic discourse and assumptions is to be seen in other ways. Both books are interested not in the close reading of text, nor even really in describing the specifically aesthetic qualities of the fiction they survey at all, but in classifying and categorizing, in isolating the thematic and structural features of these works that help Hassan and Klein compose a broader treatise on American literature as a whole, on modern intellectual history, on postwar American culture. Both are thesis-driven books—in each case, the thesis encapsulated in the book’s title—that seek to capture their cultural moment or identify a “certain tendency” in current practice, in effect to stay ahead of the literary curve, able to take the comprehensive view unavailable even to the writers whose practices are at issue. In so doing, these books proved to be the scholarly model for many academic studies of contemporary fiction to follow, which together could be taken as a kind of serial attempt to find the highest ground from which to scan the literary horizon. Indeed, this sort of well-positioned survey of current fiction would become arguably the most ambitious kind of scholarly book produced by the academic critics duly charged with the professional scrutiny of contemporary literature.

Considering that if there was a reigning critical orthodoxy at the time [Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence and Marcus Klein’s After Alienation] were written it was New Critical formalism, one might expect them to show the influence of this method, but their origin in academic discourse and assumptions is to be seen in other ways. Both books are interested not in the close reading of text, nor even really in describing the specifically aesthetic qualities of the fiction they survey at all, but in classifying and categorizing, in isolating the thematic and structural features of these works that help Hassan and Klein compose a broader treatise on American literature as a whole, on modern intellectual history, on postwar American culture. Both are thesis-driven books—in each case, the thesis encapsulated in the book’s title—that seek to capture their cultural moment or identify a “certain tendency” in current practice, in effect to stay ahead of the literary curve, able to take the comprehensive view unavailable even to the writers whose practices are at issue. In so doing, these books proved to be the scholarly model for many academic studies of contemporary fiction to follow, which together could be taken as a kind of serial attempt to find the highest ground from which to scan the literary horizon. Indeed, this sort of well-positioned survey of current fiction would become arguably the most ambitious kind of scholarly book produced by the academic critics duly charged with the professional scrutiny of contemporary literature.

In Hassan’s case, the abstracted conceptual marker is that of radical innocence, a characteristic of the “new hero” of postwar fiction, who “brings the brilliant extremities of the American conscience and imagination to bear on the equable tenor of our present culture” (6). Using this encompassing idea, Hassan makes his way through selected postwar novels, showing how in all of them “the disparity between the innocence of the hero and the destructive character of his experience defines his concrete, or existential, situation” (7). That Hassan has much bigger game than present-day novels and novelists in his sights is further evidenced just in the titles of some of his chapters: “The Modern Self in Recoil”; “The Dialectic of Initiation in America.” Although Hassan’s readings (generally brief) of particular novels and stories can certainly be insightful, and in some cases remain useful critical references for readers interested in writers Hassan discusses (the reading of Salinger, for example, which benefits in an unforeseen way from the truncated nature of his career), as a whole the book is necessarily constrained by the author’s need to fit notable postwar fiction inside the critical framework he has erected. The notion that the protagonists of the various fictions he surveys are to one degree or another marked by a “radical innocence” remains a cogent enough formulation, applicable to a significant number of American novels—not only postwar novels—but it seems unlikely that Hassan was persuaded by its cogency only after a disinterested sampling of all of the diverse kinds of fiction produced by American writers after World War II. Such a sampling would be less dramatic in its pronouncements than Radical Innocence, to be sure, and would perhaps at best result in a rambling style of discussion such as that to be found in Frederick Karl’s encyclopedic American Fictions 1940-1980. The more learned analysis of Radical Innocence certainly allows for the kind of elevated commentary that might be thought appropriate for the critic who is also a professional academic.

Many of the writers on whom Hassan focuses his attention have continued to be regarded as important postwar American writers (many of their books, at any rate, continue to be read, or least continue to be in print). A few of them, such as Jean Stafford and Frederick Buechner, are no longer very frequently discussed, a few others, such as Robie Macauley and Harvey Swados, have almost entirely faded from critical view. By and large, however, one could construct a credible syllabus for a course on American fiction of the 1950s and 1960s using those writers whose works Hassan gives the most extensive consideration: William Styron, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Salinger, Saul Bellow. Indeed, any truly comprehensive survey of American fiction in the second half of the twentieth century would readily include any or all of these writers. Radical Innocence was a considerably influential book, for many years after credited as the first general study of contemporary fiction, which inevitably leads to the question of the book’s own role in producing a consensus view of what writers really matter, in helping to determine what might be called a provisional canon of academically sanctioned contemporary writing. Was it simply obvious in 1961 that these would be the important writers of the immediate postwar period? Was Ihab Hassan especially discerning in being able to point them out? To what extent were succeeding scholars, instructors, and students persuaded by Hassan’s analysis, perhaps reinforced by other, subsequent, scholarly books and articles, enough to invest it with the authority to establish appropriate standards for this provisional canon?

Moreover, to what extent can it be said that the touchstone provided by Hassan’s book (Klein’s as well) served to initiate a process whereby “criticism” as an ongoing activity of weighing the merits of current work was brought completely within the confines of the literary academy? During the 1950s and at least partly through the 1960s there were still literary critics who worked independently of university English departments, producing intellectually respectable, albeit by today’s standards excessively “belletristic” literary criticism. With the advent of academic criticism of the sort Radical Innocence portends, such “popular” criticism begins its decline into the superficial book reviewing and book chat it essentially, with exceptions, has become. With the further transformation of text-based academic criticism into theory and cultural studies, an unforeseen consequence of the triumph of “contemporary literature” in the academy is now that very little of what previously counted as literary criticism is even published at all. Certainly Ihab Hassan could not have fully anticipated such a development, but one could argue that implicit in the project of shifting literary criticism to the academy is the possibility that it will be subject to variations in the prevailing academic paradigm.

Reading Radical Innocence today, however, one can’t help but be struck by how inexactly it appears to fit any single academic paradigm. Influenced by American studies, incorporating elements of existential philosophy, myth criticism, and cultural anthropology, but not identical with any of these, it is, as I have already stressed, still a notable book in part because it helped to create a place for the study of contemporary literature, in effect to build a new paradigm suitable for academic discussion of current writing. Yet if it does not conform to any particular version of the then sanctioned scholarly methodology, it might not either be regarded by today’s academic readers as altogether “scholarly” in its presentation, at least according to presently preferred procedures and standards of decorum. Chapter 4, “The Victim with a Thousand Faces,” begins:

History in the West seems to be consumed before it is made. The modern age belongs already to the past, the contemporary period yields to the immediate present, and the present in America fades in pursuit of an uncreated future. Obsolescence is the tribute we pay to our faith in perfectibility. And yet we continue to wonder about the internal logic, the unheard voice and the impalpable fatality, of the moment in which we live. (61)

The degree here of undocumented assertion, of outright, naked pronouncement, would probably not easily be accepted in the now prevailing cooler climate of scholarly discourse (however heated the underlying issues). But ultimately such prose, characteristic of the book, although not exclusively so, is not so much insufficiently academic—judged by complexity of thought rather than an established orientation to subject or style—as it is only the most obvious indication that Hassan’s overriding purpose in Radical Innocence is to express his own vision of the “modern condition,” contemporary fiction offering him the most immediately salient representations of this condition.

That much postwar American fiction does conveniently illustrate Hassan’s thesis is undeniably true, but it is also true that something like “radical innocence” is a character trait deeply rooted in American literary history and that it many ways it is not surprising this trait would reemerge with particular color and urgency in the years not simply following on World War II but also marking the beginnings of the Cold War. This is not so much a criticism of Hassan for a lack of originality or a willingness to rely on critical conventional wisdom as a more general point about the kind of stock-taking, multi-author study Radical Innocence represents. Any genuinely penetrating analysis of works of literature requires attention to particulars, if not exhaustive treatment of a particular work then careful consideration of any given work in the context of its author’s other works, at the least an assessment of the concrete effects of such tangible matters as, say, genre, or unmistakable anxieties of influence. Books that, following Radical Innocence, seek to in effect disclose the essence of contemporary writing or identify the truly significant contemporary writers, however much they may capture some relevant feature of recent literary fiction inevitably miss the many other more immediately “existential” features one actually encounters in reading individual works of fiction in favor of academic abstraction.

No more than Hassan is Marcus Klein in After Alienation much concerned with the aesthetic particulars of the works he examines, although he does discuss his five authors in more detail and across the full range of their at the time published fiction. He asserts quite explicitly, in fact, that “[t[he something new in these writers. . .is to be defined historically. . .in terms of the relevance of these writers [Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Wright Morris, Bernard Malamud] to the age.” Their importance “does not reside in any formal inventions or in any preferences of technique.” Rather, their fiction, “for all that it tends away from explicitly social subjects, is shaped by the social and political pressures of an age that is the most desperate in all history” (294). The hyperbole here is especially striking, since Klein’s enunciated thesis is that what makes his chosen writers “relevant to the age” is, presumably in response to the “social and political pressures” that under the circumstances could only be overwhelming, their work represents an “accommodation” to the realities of modern life, an “adjustment to the social fact” (29) in contrast to the typically modernist attitude of “alienation.” To adjust to the social facts of “an age that is the most desperate in all history” would seem a literary feat of remarkable rhetorical skill indeed.

Nevertheless, it is just such a determination to avoid the moral evasions of alienation that Klein locates in the work of Bellow et. al. For if Hassan draws on more eclectic sources of critical analysis, Klein seems a more straightforward moral critic of the kind perhaps most prominently represented in the postwar era by the New York intellectuals. These critics, associated in particular with the publications Commentary and Partisan Review, were indeed notable for the serious attention they gave to the work of current writers, and, initially at least, were mostly unaffiliated with university literary study. But by the mid 1960s not only were a number of the more prominent New York intellectuals (Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin) increasingly moving into university-sponsored positions, but younger critics in part inspired by them were also entering the university as bona fide academics. Klein, who received his Ph.D from the Columbia University English department of Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase, seems clearly to be writing from within the ambit of the New York critics and their focus on the social and cultural efficacy of literature, and his book represents both the exhaustion of Partisan Review-style criticism as an independent critical movement and its assimilation into the broader authority of academic literary study, as well as a kind of final capitulation to that authority about which even someone as thoroughly ensconced in academe as Trilling had expressed reservations (Leitch 109-14).

It is also a material example of the rightward political drift of the New York school as whole by the mid 60s, in this case manifested not so much in the neoconservative political views to which many of the original New York intellectuals became increasingly inclined but in Klein’s outright disdain for the legacy of modernism, or at least the American version of this legacy, which he reduces to the assumed attitude of “alienation.” The New York critics are remembered largely as the expositors of modernism, champions of modernist complexity, although their enthusiasm for modernist writing was allied with a belief in its political potential. Klein continues this preoccupation with “social engagement”—“Social engagement,” he writes at one point, “is the meaning of accommodation” (26)—but the social/cultural significance Klein discerns in the fiction he singles out in his book is of a decidedly moderate if not utterly conformist character. In isolating those qualities of this fiction that allow him to argue it shows an accommodation to the social realities of postwar America one could also say that Klein robs it of its capacity to do anything other than affirm, and in so doing take its orderly place in Klein’s own accommodationist Cold War sociology.

That Klein would prove to be wildly wrong about, at the very least, the endurance of this move toward accommodation among American writers—even as Klein was publishing his book an intensely iconoclastic and unaccommodating strain of comic and experimental fiction was beginning to appear and would eventually come to seem the most significant development in postwar American fiction—and even arguably exaggerated the degree of accommodation expressed in, especially, Ellison, Baldwin, and Malamud is not the most important point to be made about After Alienation, however, although it does insure that few people would want to read it now aside from its historical interest. But it does have historical interest as the prototype for the academic survey in which contemporary literature provides a useful tool for sounding out fluctuations in the cultural atmosphere, however much the writing itself stands in as notional subject. The book further offers a compelling illustration that an interest in literature as political instrument or as the means for “cultural criticism,” no matter how “radical” its origins or “engaged” with the social and moral issues to which literature affords a point of access, is ultimately fully consonant with an academic criticism that likewise exploits the cultural standing of literature as a way of elevating its own discursively distinct project. In both cases, moreover, the aesthetic import of work not yet fully assimilated into even the most expansively defined literary “canon” is not merely ignored but implicitly judged not to be the concern of criticism at all.

If anything, After Alienation is even less interested in aesthetic analysis than Radical Innocence. Klein’s chapters consist mainly of a series of plot synopses and cursory explications that keep the writer focused on the book’s thesis that the important American writers after World War II move toward accommodation, which Klein at least manages to stress with some efficiency. It is noteworthy that, at a time when the prevailing academic critical method was –or is now broadly perceived to have been—New Criticism, these two books that first bring extended scholarly attention to postwar American fiction so resolutely resist formalism altogether, much less the specific presuppositions now attached to the New Critics. This approach to contemporary fiction—as a source of ideas or examples or cultural generalizations but not really as the object of detailed formal or aesthetic critique—has been prevalent enough in subsequent years that one could wonder whether there doesn’t after all lurk beneath the expanding scrutiny of contemporary fiction a residual uncertainty about its artistic value in the long run. How far beyond the disdain for contemporary writing embodied in the curriculum against which Klinkowitz rebelled is it really to allow certain writers and their work a kind of utility for advancing a brand of academic cultural commentary but implicitly regarding it as otherwise ill-suited to the ends of aesthetic inquiry? (To the extent, of course, that aesthetic inquiry is itself regarded as relevant to the business of academic criticism.)

Together Radical Innocence and After Alienation did help to establish for American fiction of mid-century an identity separate from the “modern” fiction of the era following on World War I and clearly placed in the context of post-World War II American culture. One could even argue that although the concepts of “radical innocence” and “accommodation” seem to be at some variance as critical terms for apprehending this identity, they are actually two sides of the same critical coin, a retreat from “alienation” that, given the conditions of the immediate postwar period, assuredly requires the most radical kind of innocence. But by 1971, when Tony Tanner’s City of Words was published, the stability of that identity delineated by Hassan and Klein is plainly in question, and the critical effort needed to keep track of the direction in which fiction is heading has greatly expanded.

The most immediately noticeable sign of that expanded effort in City of Words is the very breadth of its coverage of “American Fiction 1950-1970.” Well over twenty American fiction writers are given extended treatment in Tanner’s book, many others are discussed more briefly, and Tanner apologizes in his preface for being unable to get to at least a dozen more. This encyclopedic approach is accompanied by a surprising variety in selection, despite the more specific emphasis on what might be called “experimental” fiction that emerges from the book; certainly it is more interested in the formally and stylistically bolder fiction that was appearing in the 1960s than either Radical Innocence or After Alienation. While Tanner examines the work of such now notoriously postmodern writers as John Barth, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon, he also includes chapters on Malamud, Ellison, John Updike, and Norman Mailer, none of them plain stylists to be sure, but certainly all considered “mainstream” postwar novelists. The diversity of subjects and approach represented by these writers would seem to cast doubt on the enterprise of establishing a commonality among their novels and stories based on a shared cultural outlook or any single imputed theme.

Another significant difference between City of Words and its two predecessors (both of which Tanner himself cites as forerunners in the preface to his book) is the method by which Tanner claims to have come to the critical insight about postwar fiction that serves as the book’s thesis, embodied in its title. “When I started thinking about writing this book,” Tanner writes, “I had no preconceived notions about recurrent themes by which I could group writers, or neat categories in which I could place their work. If anything, I embarked on my readings and re-readings motivated mainly by a sense of admiration for the wide range of individual talent which has emerged in American fiction during the last two decades.” Instead, “with continued intensive reading, certain recurring preoccupations, concerns, even obsessions, began to emerge from what at first appeared to be very dissimilar novels” (15). Thus, while one senses that Hassan and Klein approached their projects with preconceived philosophical and political ideas they hoped to illustrate through their selection of writers and texts, Tanner is more genuinely presenting a reading of the fiction he cites, a consideration of its manifest features as they make themselves apparent to the critic interested in identifying them. This is arguably, in fact, the most revealing and impressive feature of City of Words itself, one that finally distinguishes it most clearly from books like Radical Innocence and After Alienation, and one that regrettably few later studies of contemporary fiction really shared. Tanner gives the impression, at least, of giving his attention to the immediately experiential qualities of his texts, of taking from them what they have to give—of being concerned first and foremost with what these texts have to offer as literary creations.

Tanner’s interest in the literary character of current fiction is expressed most directly in his book’s focus on language, on the tendencies of style he finds at work in much of this fiction. Although the specific styles of the disparate group of writers are distinctive enough (a fact of which Tanner takes due account in his individual analyses of their fiction), Tanner does delineate a common impulse among these writers to accentuate style to the point of making language itself implicitly one of the subjects their fiction pursues. So insistent is this impulse that Tanner introduces the term “foregrounding” to describe “the use of language in such a way that it draws attention to itself—often by its originality.” Even more pointedly, Tanner suggests that in some cases of especially self-referential styles “within the same book words can be both referential and part of a verbal display” (20). Although Tanner is attentive as well to other formal and thematic elements of this fiction that takes its readers to the “city of words” (of plot he writes: “narrative lines are full of hidden persuaders, hidden dimensions, plots, secret organizations, evil systems, all kinds of conspiracies against spontaneity of consciousness, even cosmic take-over” (16)), it is this thesis about the self-reflexivity of postwar fiction and Tanner’s thorough exegesis of his selected texts in illustration of it that continues to make City of Words an intriguing and rewarding work of historically informed literary criticism.

Along with Robert Scholes’s The Fabulators (1967) (discussed below in its later republished version, Fabulation and Metafiction), City of Words is the first critical study to take note of this new self-reflexive fiction. While the word “postmodern” does not appear in Tanner’s book, what would soon routinely be called by that name is, retrospectively at least, clearly the real subject with which Tanner is engaged. In many ways Tanner’s analysis of this fiction captures its most essential characteristics and identifies its most important practitioners; other, later, books would concentrate more intensively on “metafiction,” on black humor, on the “art of excess,” but few of them would really advance that much beyond the insights into the foregrounding of style, the creation of “verbal space,” the American writer’s antipathy to “conditioning forces,” afforded by City of Words. For that matter, no later elucidation of the artistic motives or conceptual designs behind the practice of literary postmodernism quite explains the whole phenomenon as well as Tanner’s observation that “American writers seem from the first to have felt how tenuous, arbitrary, and even illusory, are the verbal constructs which men call descriptions of reality” (27).

Nevertheless, throughout the two decades following the publication of City of Words—the period during which “contemporary literature” was accepted in the academic curriculum as an intellectually respectable subject of study—the perceived cutting edge in academic criticism of contemporary fiction was unquestionably criticism about or related to the innovative writers who could plausibly be associated with the postmodern. Indeed, a serious scrutiny of academic scholarship in general during these years would just as unquestionably reveal that the burgeoning critical and scholarly discourse on “postmodernism” more generally was derived more or less directly from this original discourse on the postmodern in American fiction. To the extent that City of Words stands as the precursor to these later books and scholarly articles, it must be said to have initiated what has been to date the most influential line of academic critical fashion in the study of contemporary literature. Unfortunately, so prominent, in fact did this line become that the very word “postmodern” would eventually be understood by many as almost synonymous with “academic” in its most imposing and ponderous mode, and in turn postmodern fiction would be classified as academic in an equally derogatory sense of the term.

"Black People's American Experience"

(As a pdf)

Since Juice! is Ishmael Reed's first novel in almost twenty years, many of its potential readers, intrigued, perhaps by its treatment of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, will probably be encountering Reed's work for the first time. Perhaps these readers are aware of him as an op-ed controversialist critical of media portrayals of African-Americans, particularly African-American men, skeptical of the achievement of African-American women writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and a bete noire of white feminists and of the "liberal class" in general. That Reed was at one time controversial as the first, and arguably only, African-American "postmodern" writer of fiction, compared to Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme in his expression of the postmodern worldview and his disruptions of form and style, is likely at best merely an historical echo, however. Doubtless there are fewer readers now who can readily judge a new work by Ishmael Reed in the context of this earlier work and of his still-evolving career as a whole.

Those who have followed Reed's career as a writer should immediately recognize the significant differences between Juice! and the novels that initially brought attention to his unconventional fiction, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). In consonance with the defiant, iconoclastic spirit of the period, these novels employ a kind of surrealist farce that travesties all that it encompasses, including fictional form itself. They exhibit what will become Reed's signature hallucinatory imagery--"Hairy Sam" ruling over his urban kingdom (also called Hairy Same) from his seat on a toilet in The Free-Lance Pallbearers--casual anachronism--although ostensibly a period Western, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Downcharacters listen to soul music and come across "old Buicks and skeletons of washing machines"--and outrageous names--Bukka Doopeyduk, Zozo Labrique, etc. They are entertaining in a deliberately zany kind of way, which on the one hand invests them with the spirit of postmodern comedy other writers of the time were venturing as an alternative to the sober realism of the 1950s, but on the other hand draws attention to the underlying racial and cultural issues more vividly than such sober realism could any longer achieve.

Even in their displacements and distortions, these two early novels maintain narrative coherence by adhering to an essentially allegorical structure through which the reader clearly is to discern a critique of American racial attitudes (on the part of both white and black characters) as manifested in the present as well as in the historical American past (the two sometimes intersect, as they will also in the later Flight to Canada (1976)). The Free-Lance Pallbearers is a coming-of-age story of sorts, tracing its protagonist's recognition of the cultural and political corruption of his immediate environment and of the futility of his own attempts to accommodate himself to this society, given its ultimate hostility to his interests and its disregard for his well-being. While to a degree Pallbearersis a parody of the coming-of-age story (Bukka Doopeyduk doesn't survive to apply the lessons he's learned apart from the way he applies them by narrating his story from the grave), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is an out-and-out parody of the Western genre. Its protagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, also confronts a while authority figure, the rancher Drag Gibson, although in this mock Western the rancher and the outlaw (John Wesley Hardin) are united in their racism and in their efforts to do in the Loop Garoo Kid, who has escaped a Drag-directed massacre and is hiding out in a cave in the hills.

From the cave, Loop begins practicing a form of necromancy related to voodoo, an activity or state of being Reed will later explicitly identify as "Neo-HooDooism." (In Yellow Back Radio, the Loop GarooKid is at one point called a "HooDoocowboy.") The nature of this endeavor is suggested when we are told he performs "a tailor made micro-HooDoo mass to end 2000 years of bad news in a Bagi he had built in the corner of the cave." Although the spell is directed first of all at Drag Gibson and the town of Yellow Back Radio, the significance of Neo-HooDoo as a trope in Ishmael Reed's fiction is announced at the end of Loop's ceremony when he entreats "Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo to

open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People's American experience "corrupt" "perverse" and "decadent." Please show them that Booker T. and the MG's, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world. Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art.

While the anachronism involved here is hilarious, this incantation also rather succinctly expresses the philosophy of Neo-Hoodooismas it is further invoked in Reed'ssubsequent novels. "HooDoo" is the approach to both experience and art that, while most identified with the black culture of the Carribean, later imported to New Orleans, is, in Reed'sversion, attributable to all non-white and indigenous cultural groups in the Western hemisphere that have in one way or another resisted the wholesale incorporation of "Western" values and practices. The spirit of HooDoo thus animates the music of Booker T. and the MG's and the dance steps of Bojangles Robinson, and it affirms "Black People's American experience," which, although very "American" in the way it is shaped as a response to the conditions of these groups'encounter with Western values as embodied in the dominant culture, is finally not entirely assimilable to that culture. Ishmael Reed'sfiction is both a celebration of the HooDoo aesthetic and itself an illustration of that aesthetic. Thus Reed writes novels, but, whether one finds them aesthetically satisfying or not, they are surely unlike novels written by anyone else in the way they explode expectations of what novels should be like.

Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and The Last Days of Louisiana Red(1974) are Reed's most thorough treatments of Neo-HooDooism, through the figure of Papa LaBas, portrayed as the most explicit example of what one critic has called a "HooDoo trickster." According to James Lindroth, the trickster "is driven by a mocking wit that subverts white authority and destroys white illusions of superiority while simultaneously promoting numerous value-laden symbols of black culture." ("Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the HooDoo Trickster.") In Mumbo Jumbo, probably Reed'smost intricate, resonant novel, the essence of HooDoo is evoked in "Jes Grew," a kind of spiritual distillation of HooDooism that first manifested itself in a 19th century New Orleans dance but that has its origins in ancient Egypt. Jes Grew has unmoored itself and inhabited the work of other artists and musicians. It encourages emotional release, as opposed to Western rationalism. In the words of Kathryn Hume, "those who practice the Jes Grew philosophy live for the present to enjoy every moment to the fullest, not simply to become something else in the distant future." ("Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control.") Acceptance of this philosophy of course threatens the established order, which profits from the ideological emphasis on "future," and so a secret society of the elite is trying to wipe it out.

Papa LaBas has been enlisted to foil this secret society and to recover an ancient text describing the original dance. He succeeds in the first task but fails at the second. Jes Grew is too appealing to too many to be stamped out, but it is also too dynamic and spontaneous to be adequately encapsulated in a single text. It has "grown" in too many directions, draws on too many different mediating inspirations to be given an authoritative expression. This variety is reflected in the form and style of Reed's novels, especially these earliest novels, which are characterized by what one critic calls thier "syncretism," paralleling the syncretism of Jes Grew/Neo-HooDooism: "In Reed's novels, it is not uncommon to find the formal blend of language mixed with the colloquial, as it is Reed's contention that such an occurrence in the narrative is more in keeping with the ways contemporary people influenced by popular culture really speak." (Reginald Martin, "Ishmael Reed's Syncretic Use of Language: Bathos as Popular Discourse.") The central narrative voice primarily acts as the facilitator of the "blend of language," allowing the different modes of language to come into contact. This voice otherwise is notable for its directness and its avoidance of "literary" dressing.

Reed's syncretism extends to the formal structures of his novels as well--although Reed uses variety and juxtaposition largely to undermine structure as associated with the conventional novel. Other texts and narrative forms are freely interpolated into the main narrative to create a collage-like effect, the phantasmagorical qualities of which are only intensified in works like Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Flight to Canadaby the blurring of time and rapid shifting between characters and subplots. The latter novel may represent Reed's last really satisfying use of the syncretic method to create a broadly surreal comedy that keeps Reed's satire from becoming merely polemical. Although it focuses directly on the source of the American racial divide, slavery, in its story of an escaped slave's quest for freedom in Canada, as a parody of a slave narrative it doesn't exactly present an orthodox account of the Civil War period and the struggle for emancipation. While the portrayal of its white characters, including an antebellum slave master and Abraham Lincoln, is excoriating enough (in Reed's typical cartoonish mode), its black characters are certainly not portrayed one-dimensionally as victims in the way we would expect of a slave narrative. Both of the main characters incorporate elements of the Trickster figure, while the novel ultimately discredits the notion of "freedom" associated with the flight "north." The white-dominated culture created in North America won't willingly extend its concept of freedom to non-whites, ultimately making Reed's Neo-HooDooism a permanent form of resistance.

In the novels Reed has published after Flight to Canada, the satirical range has beome much more constricted, the targets more personal, the issues at stake arguably more idiosyncratic, even petty. Reckless Eyeballing (1986) takes aim at feminism, depicting it in particular as hostile to African-American men and initiating that phase of Reed's career in which he became a scourge of white feminists (although Reckless Eyeballing represents black feminists as also joining in on the abuse). Japanese by Spring (1993) is an academic satire that savages all the scholarly tendencies of the university as excuses for self-aggrandizement and individual agendas and depicts the academy as the redoubt of cowards and knaves. Aesthetically, this narrowing of satirical purpose has resulted in novels that are less adventurous, less interested in creating their own reality, more focused on evoking and critiquing existing reality. The humor is still there, but in this context of reduced satirical ambitions, Reed's mockery can seem heavy-handed, his exaggerated situations and behaviors merely contrivances. At the end of Japanese by Spring, when "Ishmael Reed" takes over as the main character, what could be if handled more nimbly an amusing metafictional conceit becomes instead just an opportunity for Ishmael Reed to editorialize and declaim.

Reed's chief editorial concern has become the problem of the beseiged black man, and Juice! is wholly dedicated to elucidating that problem. The novel's protagonist is a cartoonist, Paul Blessings, who is fixated on O.J. Simpson, all of his trials, and the public reaction to Simpson as the embodiment of the image of the black man as killer, as "all black men rolled into one." Blessings keeps track of Simpson developments in minute detail, and his account moves back and forth from the original Simpson trial to the later civil trial to the incident in the Las Vegas hotel room that eventually led to his conviction for robbery to other episodes relating to Simpson, as well as all of the media response to and commentary about Simpson's actions. Reed uses the Simpson case to lambaste the American news media as the mouthpiece of cultural prejudice responsible for perpetuating stereotypes of the black man as Other. Since the criticisms made by Blessings (also known as "Bear") are the same criticisms--not just of media but also of feminists, academics, homosexual activists, politically correct liberals, as well as racist conservatives--made by Reed in his previous novels and in numerous of his public pronouncements, its is surpassingly obvious that Bear is a mouthpiece for Ishmael Reed, making the novel perhaps the most transparently polemical one Reed has written. It is as if the O.J. Simpson case provided Reed a fortuitously convenient instance that brings together all of his critical targets and allows him to take aim with an especially obsessive focus.

Paul Blessings' own obsession with Simpson is nothing if not comprehensive, and his insistence not just that racial fears contributed to the national fascination with Simpson's murder trial but that he was actually innocent of the charges against him initially give the novel a certain contrarian appeal. In addition, Blessings' surveys of the facts of the case and his media critique, while they occupy a large portion of the narrative, are not the only features of his story. Blessings is himself a media figure of modest renown, his cartoons featured on a public television station in the transformation of which from an independent hippie station to a kind of low-rent Fox news he becomes involved. With O.J.'s downfall as a cautionary tale illustrating the dangers awaiting a black man who doesn't stick to the role assigned him, Blessings mutes the social commentary of his cartoons and plays along with the station manager and his reactionary agenda, even though that agenda includes using someone like Blessings to provide multicultural cover. Blessings even wins a prestigious cartoonist society prize for a cartoon perceived to be anti-O.J.

Reed thus implicates his protagonist in the very cultural practices the novel condemns, and in the process complicates our response to Paul Blessings as character and narrator enough to give Juice! some aesthetic credibility as a work of fiction rather than merely an extended screed masquerading as a novel. To an extent Reed holds his narrator up to satirical examination as well, if only to suggest how difficult it is to avoid reinscribing corrupt behavior while still trying to negotiate one's way in a corrupt system. But the satirical veneer is nevertheless very thin, and few readers will think that Blessings' demonstrated flaws as a human being are what invalidate his views of the O.J. Simpson case or gainsay his analysis of American society's attitude toward black men. Some, perhaps many, readers will find these views unconvincing and the analysis tendentious, but responding to the novel's argument as an argument is ultimately unavoidable given that so little effort is made to keeping that argument implicit, as is generally done in the best satire, while much is devoted to fleshing out argument in exhaustive and explicit detail.

It seems likely that Reed considers his audience to be mostly hostile to the argument. While it is possible that readers sympathetic to O.J. Simpson would enjoy Paul Blessings' contrarian account, the novel is most provocative as a challenge to readers who believe Simpson was guilty of double murder and subsequently received just, if insufficient, punishment. However, it doesn't seem likely that either set of readers would find the elaborate exposition of this account other than tedious after a while (for me it was relatively early), although perhaps all readers might be persuaded to take seriously the notion that more than concern for O.J. Simpson's victims were involved in the media coverage and commentary surrounding the "trial of the century." But at this point one might well ask: Why not offer an actual media or social critique, an essay or book on the public response to the Simpson trial and its aftermath, not a novel narrated by a substitue media critic in the guise of a fictional character? Surely Reed's opinions on this subject are not so outrageous they couldn't be sustained through a straightforward nonfiction analysis or be accepted as seriously intended. Indeed, few people will read Juice!and not understand that the opinions expressed by Paul Blessings are consistent with the author's.

Certainly Ishmael Reed has always been a writer whose novels provide social and cultural commentary, often explicit rather than subtle. But some of those novels also provide complexity of form, style, and theme, as well as a more raucous kind of humor, missing from Juice!. Reed's best work qualifies as satire, but the satire of Juice!, as well as Japanese by Spring before it, has become disappointingly laborious, degenerating into a kind of ridicule without humor. Further, the narrowness of focus in both Japanese by Spring and Juice! means that future readers will probably find the subjects dated--in fact, they may already be dated--and the details included impenetrable. While I think readers will still come to The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and Mumbo Jumbo, the arc of Reed's career nonetheless can be taken as illustration of what can happen to a writer who uses fiction as a medium for "saying something." However much what Reed wants to say leads in his best work to imaginative creations in which the "message" is just part of the interest we might as readers take in them, in Juice! the message now seems about the only thing of interest to the author.

NOTE This review might be taken as an example of the kind of thing I would be interested in receiving from outside reviewers as described in this previous post. Although readers will have to decide for themselves whether it does so effectively, the review attempts to review the book at hand in the context of the author's career, prevailing style, themes, etc. Reviews might also concentrate more intensively on the particular book under review, providing close reading, etc., but I would be looking for reviews that are substantial and that aren't necessarily "timely."

The Organized Efforts of the Program: On McGurl's The Program Era

(As a pdf)

To say, as Mark McGurl does in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, that "far from occasioning a sad decline in the quality or interest of American literature, as one so often hears, the writing program has generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with tremendous energy--and a times great brilliance--by a vast range of writers who have also been students and teachers" is not to say creative writing programs themselves have been responsible for the "tremendous energy" and frequent "brilliance" that I agree does indeed characterize a great deal of American fiction in the post-World War II period (especially the period of the 1960s and 70s). Although I wouldn't necessarily claim that a "vast" number of energetic and brilliant writers have been "students and teachers" in creative writing programs, still, a large enough number of such writers, from Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme to Stanley Elkin, have participated in the creative writing "program" to one extent or another, but surely these writers would have been just as energetic and just as brilliant if they had not had creative writing to jump-start their careers or to provide them with a reliable livelihood.

Nor to say that, on the whole, the "program era" has produced "a rich and multifaceted body of literary writing" to say that, however "multifaceted" it might be," this body of work is "rich" all the way down. Again, just to list some of the writers who have been associated with creative writing is to show that much of the best postwar fiction can be claimed by "the program," even if it is hardly responsible for providing these writers with their talent. That creative writing has help to nurture writers from previously underrepresented groups of American is undeniable (and one of its greatest accomplishments), but this does not mean either that it can be credited with the quality of what the best of these writers ultimately produced or that the fiction created by these groups is uniformly "rich." I believe that creative writing programs can help aspiring writers achieve a minimum level of competence with certain kinds of writing tasks they may not have been able to achieve as quickly on their own, but they surely do not manufacture good writers simply through the fact of their existence.

McGurl does make a claim on behalf of the enhanced "excellence" of postwar American fiction that is based on the fortuitous rise of creative writing:

Because of the tremendous expansion of the literary talent pool coincident to the advent of mass higher education, and the wide distribution, therein, of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which these ambitions might plausibly be realized, is it not true that owing to the organized efforts of the program--to the simple fact of our trying harder than ever before--there has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period?

Many readers and reviewers seem to have taken The Program Era as a brief on behalf of the salubrious effects of creative writing on American literature (really just American fiction), but this is as concrete an account of the way in which creative writing "improved" American literature as we get--it was there to take advantage of the greater accessibility to higher education, and the increase in "literary ambitions" this inevitably entailed, and to encourage "habits of self-conscious attention to craft." Nothing in the overwhelmingly most popular method of creative writing instruction adopted by writing programs--the "workshop" method--is shown in particular to have resulted in the "excellence" of the system, although the focus on "craft" has presumably helped foster a more widespread technical competence in the "literary fiction" that gets published.

That is why Elif Batuman's critique of creative writing in the guise of a review of The Program Era, which otherwise made some perfectly good points worthy of debate, was really beside the point as a response to McGurl's book. McGurl is more interested in the way in which writers, finding themselves in an environment in which they were systematically exposed to "a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems," unavoidably considered and addressed those problems and how American fiction in the postwar era unavoidably shows the influence of this engagement.Thus, when Batuman (among others) focuses on whether creative writing is good or bad for writers, she's not really discussing the subject of The Program Era, and when McGurl himself takes up Batuman's indictment, he has to alter his own focus and consider the questions she raises about the baneful effects of creative writing on would-be writers. His book describes the ways in which writers and their work have reflected or embodied the "complex" problems they encountered from within the system, a description to which Batuman's reservations about creative writing as a discipline simply aren't germane.

Ultimately The Program Era isn't much different from many other academic studies of postwar or "contemporary" fiction that attempt to find just the right formulation or critical insight that captures the essence of postwar fiction, or at least an important practice that is distinctive of postwar fiction. Other books propose such terms as "systems novel" or "radical innocence" or "dirty realism" as candidates. ("Black humor," "metafiction," "minimalism," and, indeed, "postmodern" began as such terms.) McGurl proposes "program fiction." As an interpretive tool, this formulation works pretty well in McGurl's analysis, and in my opinion The Program Era is a valuable addition to the collection of scholarly studies of postwar American fiction attempting to give this period some critical definition.

Such books have been numerous, of course, because as a scholarly discipline, "contemporary literature" is by definition undefined. The literary "fields" predating the contemporary have already been intensively, and more or less permanently, sorted and categorized, their important authors, works, trends, and movements identified and established for further study. As an academic field, contemporary literature is unsettled and in flux (although perhaps the immediate postwar era, say 1945-1975, is becoming more stable in its outlines), which on the one hand provides an opportunity for an assiduous and well-read critic to map the territory, but on the other hand this effort probably can't help but be reductive unless the critic merely intends to treat all writers and works equally, including as many of the former as possible and restricting discussion of the latter to simple summary.

Thus if The Program Era is not as comprehensive as it claims to be, this does not make it less useful as an examination of that large enough slice of American fiction on which McGurl concentrates--the fiction that can plausibly be understood at least in part by its author's affiliation with writing programs. But just to name a few of the writers that McGurl excludes from consideration indicates the limitations of "program era" as interpretive lens: Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer. Elkin, Gass, and Sorrentino were associated with creative writing programs, but their work nevertheless doesn't quite fit McGurl's notion of "technomodernism," his renaming of one the tendencies usually identified with the postmodern. Bellow, Updike, and Mailer are perhaps the three most obvious examples of writers who had nothing to do with creative writing, and it is really implausible to claim that postwar American fiction can be adequately measured without discussing them.

"Program fiction" becomes in McGurl's analysis a perfectly coherent concept for thinking about this kind of contemporary fiction, but finally "program era" doesn't suffice as a label for the whole period. The book is very good in its chronicling of the way the pool of literary talent was expanded by creative writing, and in analyzing the dynamics of the interaction between those who found themselves part of "the program" and those "aesthetic problems" swirling around it. But, however much American society was transformed by the swell of enrollment in higher education, American literature was not completely subsumed into the university. (Indeed, another book considering those writers who resisted the migration of literature and the literary vocation into the academy would be an interesting project.) "Creative writing" did not entirely replace "fiction" and "poetry" as the name for the form to which poets and novelists aspire to contribute.

And if McGurl is trying to characterize an entire literary era, then his neglect of poetry and the role of poets in the creative writing program is also a debilitating problem, however much he needed to limit his focus to make the scope of the book manageable. In my opinion, this omission is a much more serious problem, even for the thesis that the creative writing program is the most important postwar development in American literature, than McGurl seems to think. In almost every way--number of faculty, number of students recruited, influence of a program's graduates, etc.--poetry has been on an equal footing with fiction in the development of creative writing. Is it less important to understand how the institutionalizing of literary practice has affected American poetry in the postwar years than American fiction? Is taking and teaching a poetry workshop less reflective of the democratization of higher education than taking or teaching one in fiction?

Perhaps most importantly: Are the same forces McGurl describes as influencing the work of fiction writers through creative writing programs similar in shaping the work of poets, such forces as the injunction to "write what you know" or the impulse to find one's "voice" or the pressures of class and ethnicity? If so, then we need an account of how such forces can be seen affecting the work of individual poets just as McGurl provides for fiction writers or the overall claims McGurl makes about their salience are less convincing. If not, then those claims are much more questionable to begin with. Arguably both the writing and the criticism of poetry have been absorbed by the academy even more thoroughly than with fiction,and a history of the creative program that deliberately avoids reckoning with the place of poetry and the consequences of its absorption seems, if not fatally flawed, then certainly incomplete.

A full account of the effects of creative writing on American fiction would also require an assessment of the role played by literary magazines in providing publication for the students and graduates of creative writing--particularly that first publication, which often determines whether a writing career will be possible. The vast majority of these magazines are either sponsored by creative writing programs themselves or publish primarily writers with ties to creative writing. They have become de facto a part of the academic system that created and maintains creative writing, and it is fair to say many if not most of them exist to keep the system working. While also rising from the "little" magazines pre-dating creative writing, these journals are now firmly entrenched as part of the academic machinery that confers status and enables promotion within the system, and their part in determining the direction of literary history--past, present, and future--needs scrutiny as well.

All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes

(As a pdf)

(This essay originally appeared in The Critical Flame.)

In a recent interview, Ben Marcus resisted being called an "experimental writer," asking rather impatiently, "Does anyone self-identify as experimental? Anyone?" Apparently Marcus is not much aware of his predecessor, John Hawkes, who once told an interviewer, "Of course I think of myself as an experimental writer," regretting only that "the term 'experimental' has been used so often by reviewers as a pejorative label intended to dismiss as eccentric or private or excessively difficult the work in question." Marcus seemed to be decrying the expectation that he should always be sufficiently experimental, but Hawkes never wavered in his determination to challenge entrenched habits and complacent practices in both the writing and reading of fiction. In the same interview, he asserted that "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." Hawkes endeavored throughout his career as a writer to validate this assumption, producing a series of novels that do indeed discard the "familiar ways of thinking" and attempt to substitute for them a "totality of vision or structure."

By both articulating a commitment to "experimental fiction" and putting into practice a coherent conception of what such fiction should do, John Hawkes established himself as perhaps the most important experimental writer in the postwar period, perhaps in all of American literature. Furthermore, his novels remain as thematically provocative and aesthetically fresh as they were when published — Hawkes's first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949, while his final novel, Sweet William, was published in 1993, five years before his death at the age of 72. Unfortunately, these novels have largely faded from literary-cultural consciousness, as has Hawkes himself, perhaps precisely because he did make such an effort to create radically varied works, each novel taking experimental fiction in a somewhat different direction (in some cases even critiquing the previous novel) so that no one work can really be identified as a "typical" Hawkes novel — all of them are typical. While any one of the novels provides its own rich and unique experience, to "get" Hawkes might require reading all of them, and perhaps that is more effort than most readers want to make.

However, those readers who are willing to devote some time to Hawkes's work, and to judge the novels on their own terms — since Hawkes himself devoted much effort to establishing those terms — would sure find it a rewarding, if at times also rather disquieting, experience. And although appreciation of Hawkes's achievement can't finally rest in singling out his "best" or most "representative" novel, it is possible to focus first on a particularly dynamic period in Hawkes's career, a period in which Hawkes produced several novels that both illustrate his inveterate experimentation and stand on their own as satisfying works of literary art. The set of novels beginning with The Lime Twig (1961) and including Second Skin (1964), The Blood Oranges (1971), and Travesty (1976) could serve as the foundation of a revival of interest in Hawkes's fiction. Each of them succeeds in redeeming the ambitions of experimental fiction, while, together, they are as impressive a group of books as any written by a postwar writer.

Not only is The Lime Twig the first in this succession of novels, it is also probably the first more or less "accessible" novel Hawkes published. His previous books were surrealistic parables that, like all of Hawkes's fictions, feature a sharp, evocative prose emphasizing focused, vivid, visual imagery and employ an essentially poetic structure to embody the "totality of vision." These early novels, however, are especially unconcerned to resolve their images and events into a rationally linear narrative that makes immediate "sense." The surrealism is startling, suggestive, and ultimately coherent to the vision presented, but readers who want this vision translated into aesthetically familiar terms will likely be (and were) disappointed by Charivari, The Cannibal, The Goose on the Grave, and The Owl. The Beetle Leg (1952), on the other hand, more directly anticipates The Lime Twig by using as its narrative scaffolding a parody of genre fiction — in this case, the Western — and by focusing on somewhat more "lifelike" characters and setting, however much both are distorted by the "vision" controlling the parody. The Beetle Leg teases us with the prospect of narrative transparency, with the possibility the novel's scenes and images will come together as part of a conventionally intelligible formal structure, but while it by no means lacks structure, it finally won't be revealed through passive reading, the expectation on the reader's part that "meaning" will be communicated by already established literary strategies.

The Lime Twig calls more on "established" strategies than The Beetle Leg, although it would still be a mistake to expect that the effect of those strategies is a reassuring return to a familiar aesthetic order. In this novel, Hawkes once again employs genre parody, this time of the crime thriller, but The Lime Twig reinforces few if any of the formal or thematic assumptions of the genre. Instead, it explodes those assumptions, turning them back on the reader. As Donald Greiner, who has perhaps offered the most insightful consideration of Hawkes's work in his book Comic Terror, puts it, "All of the violence, sadism, and general sordidness which we associate with the world of detective fiction are used and mocked" even as Hawkes further "suggests that while outwardly repelled, we subconsciously long for the thrills of violence and possible death which we normally experience vicariously while reading a detective novel." The Lime Twig offers the reader enough of the recognizable elements of character and plot associated with crime fiction to sustain the possibility it might resolve itself into a conventional "good read," but along the way it presents an even more violent and disturbing account of the criminal milieu it portrays than the typical crime novel, and ultimately provokes a kind of disgust with the notion that stories of murder and brutality would be the basis of a "good" read in the first place.

This novel prominently portrays the interaction between innocence and corruption that will also animate the series of novels to follow. It focuses on an ordinary, bored English couple who become involved with gangsters planning to steal a prize-winning racehorse. By the end of the novel, two of the main characters have been murdered, including the wife, who is savagely beaten first. Hawkes does not merely incorporate these events as plot points advancing a crime narrative, however, but dwells on them, in effect slows down the narrative to render them more starkly. The beating of Margaret Banks is particularly discomfiting:

His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field. Once he stopped to increase the volume of the radio, but returned to the bedside, shuffling, squinting down at her, his mouth a separate organ paralyzed in the lower part of his face, and paused deceptively and then made a rapid swing at her, a feint and then the loudest blow of all so swiftly that she could not gasp. When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.

The aftermath of the beating is prolonged over several more pages, before Margaret is finally killed by her assailant, Thick, an underling who has been assigned the task in response to her husband Michael's dalliance with the top gangster's moll, Sybilline. It is a scene like this, no doubt, that gained Hawkes some notoriety as a writer focused on sex and violence, but Hawkes's preoccupation with violence is not merely sensational. As Leslie Fiedler put it in his introduction to The Lime Twig, Hawkes "finally avoids the treacherous lucidity of the ordinary shocker, the kind of clarity intended to assure a reader that the violence he relives destroys only certain characters in a book, not the fabric of the world he inhabits. In a culture where even terror has been so vulgarized by mass entertainers that we can scarcely believe in it any longer, we hunger to be persuaded that, after all, it really counts. For unless the horror we live is real, there is no point to our lives; and it is to writers like Hawkes that we turn from the wholesale slaughter on T.V. to be convinced of the reality of what we most fear."

The innocence that Michael and Margaret Banks must lose is an innocence of the consequences of their drive for a more exciting life, consequences toward which they are perhaps willfully innocent and the reality of which they are subsequently made horribly aware. As readers, we too are deprived of our innocence in reading The Lime Twig, our own willful innocence about the reality of violence and about the implications of our fascination with it as portrayed in fictionalized forms. The death of Margaret Banks shocks us into reflecting on the attraction of violence-driven narratives — if we don't simply turn away from it as intolerably threatening to that assurance that the violence we confront "destroys only certain characters in a book, not the fabric of the world" to which we must return.

The Lime Twig features two additional structural devices that mark this novel as a significant development in Hawkes's career and specifically in his ongoing effort to overturn the "familiar ways of thinking about fiction." The novel begins with an excerpt from the racing column of "Sydney Slyter," who similarly introduces each chapter with his observations on the racing scene. In some ways his presence in the novel acts as a kind of chorus commenting on the events, while in others he seems a stand-in of sorts for the author, adding a metafictional level to the narrative design (really the only time in Hawkes's fiction that such an effect is created explicitly — Hawkes could be called "postmodern" in his assumptions about form, especially in his use of parody and other essentially comic aesthetic strategies, however mixed with horror, but he is not a metafictionist). But really the most noteworthy role Sydney Slyter plays is as a "voice" separate from the predominant third-person voice relating most of the rest of the narrative. However, immediately following this initial installment of "Sydney Slyter Says," another first-person account is presented to us, in this case the narrative of his life by William Hencher, a gangster ultimately responsible for tempting Michael and Margaret Banks into the horse theft scheme, who tells us how he found himself at the Banks's home, which happens to be the home Hencher once shared with his mother. Along with the interludes by Sydney Slyter, Hencher's introductory narrative represents Hawkes's first use of the first-person point of view, his first attempt to present character by employing the character's own narrative voice.

Trying out the possibilities of first-person narrative is a familiar enough practice among novelists. But in Hawkes's case this common literary experiment opened up avenues to further test the potential for point of view to produce the "totality of vision" he wanted his fiction to achieve. This focus on the radical implications of first-person narration brings immediately fruitful results in his next novel, Second Skin, a remarkably skillful and fully-executed first-person narrative that could be enjoyed simply as such. But the apparent accessibility of this novel is finally only a lure to readers, who, if following the narrative through both its stated and unstated contexts and connections, will find their perceptions of the narrator and his tale complicated in a way that only makes the novel more resonant as a literary creation. At the same time, these reversals of perception call into question the reader's efforts to arrive at a trustworthy interpretation of the story we are told — implicitly, all efforts to find stability of perspective in much of modern fiction.

Second Skin, The Blood Oranges, and Travesty together form perhaps the most thoroughgoing, radical experiment in unreliable narration in the history of fiction. (Another novel, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, published in 1974, also participates in this collective experiment, but in my opinion is a less compelling work.) On the one hand, Skipper, the middle-aged narrator of Second Skin, provides this novel, through the consistency of voice he brings, with a more obviously unified "vision" than in Hawkes's previous fiction. On the other, this surface unity is ultimately deceptive, since much of what we need to know about Skipper and the misfortune that assails him must be gathered by reading between and around the words he actually communicates. In an essay on Second Skin, Richard Yarborough contends that "the information the reader receives has been formed by two artistic consciousnesses. There is Hawkes, who ultimately retains control over, and responsibility for, the character 'Skipper' and Skipper's story; however, the events as the reader sees them have also been shaped and colored by the mind of the narrating character. Skipper himself is very much the creative artist, ordering and manipulating his materials" (Critical Essays on John Hawkes). This is, to an extent, undeniable, but the problem with calling Skipper a "creative artist" is that what his creation — his account of himself and his travails — reveals is that his "creativity" amounts to a deliberate strategy of avoiding the truth. The creative artist remains John Hawkes, whose creation of Skipper-as-narrator is "shaped" and "colored" by what he implies and conceals as much as by what he has that narrator express directly in his otherwise admittedly forceful narrative discourse.

That forcefulness is evident in the novel's very first paragraph:

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim, and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

Nothing Skipper tells us is exactly untrue, but his rhetorical exaltation and self-reinforcement mark the source of this exuberance in the profound sadness he must feel about the course his life has taken, especially in regard to the harrowing fates suffered by almost all of his loved ones: his father a suicide, his mother gone from his life very early and her whereabouts afterward mostly unknown, his alcoholic first wife also a suicide, his son-in-law, apparently a homosexual, horribly beaten to death, and finally his daughter a suicide as well, an outcome Skipper tries, and fails, to prevent. All of these horrific events remain more or less unrelated in Skipper's narrative (his daughter's suicide completely so). At most we get glimpses, as in a brief scene describing Skipper's discovery of the son-in-law's bloodied corpse, as if Skipper simply cannot acknowledge the full force of the horror he has endured, only to have the return of the repressed burst into his account nevertheless.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to accept Skipper's subsequent claim he is a "man of courage," although he must feel that indeed his good cheer and his ebullient language are themselves evidence of his bravery, of his ability to not merely survive the traumas his life has inflicted but to dismiss those traumas in triumph. But the more persistent Skipper remains in his denials, the more those denials come to seem a form of willed innocence, a refusal to countenance human violence and depravity, even though his experience has surely demonstrated they are fundamental conditions of existence. This refusal influences Skipper's narrative of ongoing events as well, since he is equally reticent to report fully on what's happening to him, leaving us frequently puzzled about the turns the narrative takes.

The narrative itself is literally bifurcated, one strand concerning Skipper's stay on an island off the coast of Maine, the other, actually the true "present" of the novel, relating his life on a tropical island to which he has fled, but the majority of the narrative relates how his experience on the first island led to his retreat to the second, which is where we find him "lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped." The two islands are juxtaposed both climatologically (the first cold and harsh, the second warm and languid) and in circumstance (on the first island more misfortune befalls Skipper, while on the second comfort reigns — or so he reports), but beyond this thematic pairing, the trajectory by which Skipper and his daughter Cassandra find their way to the first island and subsequently by which Skipper becomes a resident of the second is only fitfully traced. The events that take place on the coastal island are also recounted in an elusive sort of way, mostly because to do otherwise would require Skipper to reveal more about the circumstances that have made Cassandra suicidal. It would force him to reveal those of his own weaknesses and evasions that help explain his behavior but that also would make the behavior of other characters toward him more comprehensible as well. Skipper's treatment at the hands of the femme fatale "Miranda," for example, would seem less unmotivated if we had a firmer sense of Skipper's habitual actions toward and behavior around women.

But then, ultimately, Hawkes wants us to find the motivations of the characters obscure if not absent. As in The Lime Twig, the violence and cruelty exhibited is all the more disturbing because motives can't be discerned and thus don't explain the outbreak and intensity of violent behavior. Hawkes's vision is of a world punctuated by violence and cruelty, and Skipper's unreliable, unforthcoming narrative is what gives this vision in Second Skin its disconcerting power. It also provides the novel Hawkes's signature merging of the appalling and the comic. Skipper's withholding of the context of events often makes his actions seem ludicrously funny. We might feel more empathy, for example, when he is enlisted in a belly-bumping contest (and actually wins it) if we could perceive more directly his discomfort with the situation, if we knew more fully why Skipper seems to invite the kind of disrespectful treatment he receives when, shortly after this event, he is pelted with snowballs in the parking lot. But instead we can only laugh at his haplessness in such episodes, a response Skipper appears unable to anticipate.

Yet the reader doesn't finally quite disrespect or dislike Skipper, however unreliable or even unfathomable he sometimes seems. Ultimately his very unreliability can prompt us to reevaluate our response to him as narrator and protagonist. It pushes us to understand his narrative as part sublimation, part wish fulfillment and as itself evidence of the serial horror he has experienced. But if Second Skin leaves us trying to sort through our judgment of Skipper and our conclusions about his story (should we be pleased he has apparently found happiness in the paradise of the Caribbean island, or is this just more denial of reality?), we don't have to resolve our ambivalence about the narrator/protagonist of Hawkes's next novel, The Blood Oranges. Ambivalence is likely to turn to outright disdain for, or even a kind of horror of our own at, the protagonist's actions — although it is possible the narrator's performance seems so adept some readers might take his ultimately deceptive account of himself and the effects of his behavior on others at face value.

This seems to be what happened to one contemporaneous reviewer of The Blood Oranges, Roger Sale, who made the now infamous accusation that "Hawkes has always seemed to me more an unadmitted voyeur of horror than its calm delineator, but in this new novel the pretense that what is being described is horrifying is dropped, and we have only the nightmare version of a narrator unable to see how awful he is." The narrator of The Blood Oranges is Cyril, who, along with his wife, Fiona, has apparently become a semi-permanent resident of the fictional country of "Illyria" (presumably located in southern Europe). Cyril and Fiona meet a vacationing couple, Hugh and Catherine, with whom they form a sexual quadrangle. Both Cyril and Fiona are sexual opportunists who apparently have an "open" marriage in which each is encouraged to take other partners. Cyril is especially aggressive in his celebration of this arrangement, becoming a philosopher of erotic entanglement (or a "sex singer," as he fancies himself). Roger Sale seemed to believe that Hawkes is encouraging identification with Cyril, that because he simply allows Cyril to expound that philosophy without some clear signal we should question it, we are somehow disarmed of a critical response to Cyril and required to passively accept his discourse on love.

But this is surely a constricted view of the purposes of fiction and an ungenerous conclusion about both the author's intentions and the reader's role in the aesthetic exchange that characterizes the reading experience. The Blood Oranges challenges us to discard our habitual, unexamined deference to the perspectival integrity of the fiction we read, our assumption that the story can be accepted as presented. It provokes us to consider Cyril's chronicle of his and Fiona's sexual idyll as at best an exercise in self-deception that unwittingly draws in Hugh and Catherine and ends in tragedy, at worst a deliberately destructive indulgence in human exploitation that leads to an inevitable outcome: Catherine is lured into a sexual affair with Cyril she knows she will regret, while Hugh is led to fall in love with Fiona, which he resists vehemently enough that, together with his jealousy toward Cyril, it drives him to hang himself.

Hawkes to be sure does not make it easy for us to see through Cyril's self-serving rhetoric, so compelling can it often be. Here, Cyril describes one of the couple's interludes, in which they have brought another young native woman into their circle:

But she would not stop, was unquenchable, even while I raised my eyebrows and smiled and demurred and Fiona, lovely tense barelegged Fiona, opened the widemouthed sack and passed around the cherries. No, hands laden with that suggestive fruit and mouth stuffed with cherries, lips pursed to spit out the stones, on she talked — singling out each one of us for analysis, glancing to the rest of us for confirmation of her judgment, her appreciation, her right to associate herself with our mystery, our beauty. She overlooked Hugh's missing arm, was simply not interested in his missing arm, but concentrated instead on Hugh's little black pointed beard, reached up and stroked it with fingers juice-stained and knowing. She had tousled with the horns of the largest goat, she knew that the affinities between certain men and certain animals were to be respected. She touched her bare foot to Fiona's bare foot, giggled when Fiona giggled, then swung about and exclaimed over Catherine's breasts and filled her wet hands with Catherine's hair. And then she turned to me.

Cyril's style is of a piece with Hawkes's prose style in general, as evidenced in his other novels. It is precise and controlled, even while individual sentences can be quite lengthy and incantatory. It is intensely visual, often accumulating images and detail, breaking into a figure only when to do so sharpens the image (the young woman's fingers are "knowing"). The atmosphere conjured in the passage above is one of comfort and contentment, and perhaps we are understandably not quick to judge someone who often evokes such scenes and who writes with such authority. But Cyril's narrative threatens to lull us into a kind of complicity with his own moral blindness if we don't remain wary of his charms.

It is as if Hawkes has found the most seamless way to integrate his suspicion of fiction as subject to overly "familiar" structures with his desire to create alternative structures that have aesthetic worth. In The Blood Oranges, he fashions a sleek, sinuous structure, one that is even attractive according to the norms of traditional fiction , only to bring that structure down, without necessarily appearing to do so. The pleasures that come from an appreciation of this observable structure, even the pleasures of Hawkes's own prose, are undermined for the sake of a more comprehensive pleasure, one that sees through all efforts to construct permanent aesthetic structures in works of fiction. The "totality of structure" in The Blood Oranges consists in part of its own negation, and what remains is the "vision" that the reader has helped to invoke.

For this reason, The Blood Oranges is Hawkes's most intricate and perhaps most important novel. It "abandons" the conventional novel by offering a simulated version of it, inviting the reader to assist in the experiment that reveals it as a façade. It provokes the reader to demand of fiction a more vibrant reading experience in general, and to recognize that all the conventions supposedly involved in writing "quality" fiction are also just façades that easily be, in some cases might need to be, dismantled. In particular, The Blood Oranges exemplifies the subtle yet far-reaching possibilities in experiments with point of view, possibilities that, if anything, are taken even farther in Hawkes's 1976 novel, Travesty. If The Blood Oranges dramatizes the potential for a narrator's words to be deceiving, and for the "truth" to be outside of these words, Travesty raises the prospect that the narrator's words describe no "true" events at all, that the story is entirely the narrator's fantasy, even perhaps a delusion, making the question of narrative reliability almost infinitely unanswerable.

Travesty is narrated by a man who calls himself "Papa," and his narrative is implicitly enclosed within quotation marks, indicating ostensibly that we are to take his account as a spoken one, a monologue delivered in the presence of his daughter, Chantal, and her lover, Henri. Chantal and Henri are compelled to listen: they are passengers in a car that Papa is driving, and he informs them that he intends to crash the car into a wall. In the meantime, they must attend to his rambling explanation of how they have come arrived at this moment. Or at least this is the situation as "Papa" informs us. The structure of the novel (which is brief, only 128 pages in the original hardbound edition) allows for no interaction with Chantal and Henri — Papa speaks for them — and once Papa's words are marked as provisional by their status as recitation, we can't simply take for granted that he is speaking to anyone, or that he is really speaking at all (who recorded this monologue?). Of course, all fiction relates events that are not "real," but the "story" Papa tells is so manifestly contingent it could just as easily be taken as an artifact of his troubled mind, and thus not real even within the fictive context.

What troubles Papa seems to be not just Henri's affair with Chantal but also his previous affair with Papa's wife, which Papa claims to have known about and tolerated. However, given the low regard in which Papa apparently holds Henri, it has now become only more evidence of his own lack of control, control which he is in the process of reasserting. Travesty thus parallels The Blood Oranges in its focus on a love quadrangle and the consequences of erotic adventurism, although in this novel Papa's response to the perceived harm of this adventurism is wildly excessive. The Blood Oranges depicts one man's destructive indifference to the effects of his actions when they don't conform to his grandiose notions. Travesty depicts one man's deliberate attempt to destroy those (including himself) whose actions have provoked him into formulating some pretty grandiose notions to explain his own final act.

Papa tells Chantal and Henri that he regards this act as embodying a strategy of "design and debris." The seemingly random debris that will be left by the final collision with the wall will also manifest the "design" that he has brought to the conception and carrying-out of his plan. He reflects on the scene:

Well, you understand that . . . I would prefer that the remains of our crash go undiscovered, at least initially. I would prefer that these remains be left unknown to anyone and hence unexplored, untouched. In this case we have at the outset the shattering that occurs in utter darkness, then the first sunrise in which the chaos, the physical disarray, has not yet settled — bits of metal expanding, contracting, tufts of upholstery exposed to the air, an unsocketed dial impossibly squeaking in a clump of thorns — though this same baffling tangle of springs, jagged edges of steel, curves of aluminum, has already received its first coating of white frost. In the course of the first day the gasoline evaporates, the engine oil begins to fade into the earth, the broken lens of a far-flung headlight reflects the progress of the sun from a furrow in what was once a field of corn. The birds do not sing, clouds pass, the wreckage is warmed, the human remains are integral with the remains of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.

Papa has clearly thought through the details of his projected act (almost like an artist envisioning the completed work). In fact, so completely has he laid out the "design" that emerges from the wreckage he imagines will result from that act we might indeed conclude the real design is Papa's discourse itself, bringing order to the debris littering his unsettled mind.

Numerous commentators have singled out the notion of "design and debris" as perhaps a name for the aesthetic philosophy at work not just in this novel, and not just in Hawkes's work as a whole, but in the collective practice of "postmodern" experiment in general: the existing conventions of fiction are smashed but this smashing is itself purposeful and amid the debris a new design can be discerned. This is a compelling enough argument, but in the case of Travesty, The Blood Oranges, and Second Skin "design and debris" could be applied even more specifically to the effect of Hawkes's experiments in point of view. Hawkes so thoroughly hollows out the presumptive authority of the first-person narrative that this mode collapses of its own weight. Yet the novels still reveal an "innate design," partly to be found in the artful way that collapse is effected, through which the dominating "vision" is expressed. And while the terms of that vision are distinctive to each individual work, it is the kind of dark vision one might expect from a writer who believed that fiction should compel readers to confront the realities of human experience, not through the formulas of "realism" but through a kind of experimental writing that doesn't allow us our own usual evasions.

Deep-Hearted

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I think it is fair to say that, although particular books of his might receive a few less-than-effusive endorsements, Richard Russo is a highly regarded novelist among mainstream American book reviewers. Although Empire Falls seems to be the work that received the greatest praise, and remains a critical favorite, reviews of Russo's two most recent novels, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic, only confirm Russo's standing. Ron Charles, not ordinarily given to hyperbole, called Bridge of Sighs "a lovely, deep-hearted novel," even though he also identified several seemingly serious flaws (and then wondered if "these complaints sound more damning than I mean them to.") Janet Maslin found it "richly evocative and beautifully wrought, delivered with deceptive ease," further lauding Russo's "wonderfully unfashionable gift for effortless storytelling on a sweeping, multigenerational scale," while Glenn C. Altschuler swoons over That Old Cape Magic, declaring it "suffused with [Russo's] signature comic sensibility, and with insights, by turns tender and tough, about human frailty, forbearance, fortitude, and fervor."

In support of such praise, reviewers most often cite Russo's ability to evoke a sense of place, especially his native upstate New York, his creation of believable characters to whom he seems to have "affection," his "comic sensibility," as Altschuler puts it, although this is sometimes referred to as his "wry" tone, as well as his lively, if uncomplicated, prose style. Most importantly, these virtues are put in the service of an emotionally resonant, "humane" vision that, if it doesn't always make us feel good, nevertheless satisfyingly reveals to us what it means "to be human." ("When you finish a Russo novel," writes Geoff Schumacher in his review of TOCM "you feel you have really learned something about how human beings function.") You may like some of Russo's books more than others, but they are all "deep-hearted."

Presumably many readers agree with these assessments, since, among "literary" writers, Russo is one of the most popular. And it may indeed be the case that to the extent there is a larger audience for "serious" fiction, a writer like Richard Russo is what those readers (and critics) want. However, although I can understand why many readers might enjoy Russo's novels, which provide a kind of expansive realism and a cast of characters with whom to "identify," I can't accept that this sort of fiction qualifies as "serious" or "literary" or that reviewers would so readily and eagerly celebrate Russo's novels as such. Both the qualities that might make his novels "good reads" and that make them critically embarrassing choices as exemplars of aesthetically serious fiction can be seen in Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic.

Bridge of Sighs is a family saga centering around the life of Lou C. ("Lucy") Lynch, introduced to us as a 60 year-old married man and proprietor of several convenience stores. Told mostly from Lucy's point of view, the novel chronicles Lucy's childhood in Thomaston, an upstate New York equivalent of a decaying mill town, his love/hate relationship with his parents (love for his father, a good deal of hate for his mother), his intense friendship (intense on Lucy's part, at least) for Bobby Marconi, his courtship of Sarah, who eventually becomes his wife. Most of the drama enacted among these characters is pretty soapy. Indeed, as Louis Menand has it, Bridge of Sighs is "high-quality soap opera," distinguishable from a book like Peyton Place mostly in that it is "gentler."

Menand thinks that the characters in Bridge of Sighs are nevertheless "convincingly alive" (as arguably they are not in Peyton Place), but I can't quite agree. Lucy Lynch is a plausible enough creation (although I don't completely believe in his utter passivity and his attachment to the dreary Thomaston), but the other characters are too neatly arranged into palpable dualisms: the saintly Sarah and the whorish Karen, both of whom might be vying for Lucy's affection; the gregarious and optimistic Lou, Sr., who dotes on Lucy, and the impatient, disabused Tessa, who tries to make her son face reality; the shiftless but lovable Gabriel Mock, a black man who befriends Lucy and the industrious if stern Miss Rosa, whom Sarah meets near the end of the novel (that these are the portraits Russo is able to make of African-American characters seems especially unfortunate, although both characters are forced to speak in a thoroughly unconvincing rendition of Black English). These flaws notwithstanding, by far the least convincing character in the book is Bobby Marconi, or at least the version of Bobby that becomes "Robert Noonan," a world-renowned artist who managed to leave Thomaston and then find his calling as an artistic genius--a calling for which there is no hint whatsoever in the depiction of Bobby Marconi.

I do agree with Menand that it is a strength of Russo's writing that he is able to convincingly portray a sense of place, to use a town like Thomaston to illustrate "the postwar metamorphosis of places like Thomaston. . .from self-sufficient centers of minor industry into faceless, interchangeable nodes in the giant exurban sprawl." As Menand suggests, Russo is able to do this by taking towns like Thomaston seriously in all their specificity, focusing on things like "what happens when a new A. & P. comes to town--it puts the milkman out of work and the corner grocery store out of business." If nothing else, one leaves Bridge of Sighs with a strong impression of the reality of Thomaston, and towns like it. This is a not insignificant achievement, and to the extent critics base their esteem for Russo on it they are to some extent justified, although most reviewers focus on setting as simply a sociological given rather than on how Russo engages with setting aesthetically-how he makes it aesthetically credible.

That Old Cape Magic also strongly evokes setting, although in this case it couldn't really be farther removed, metaphorically, at least, from the socially marginalized setting of Bridge of Sighs. This novel is framed by two trips to Cape Cod, and much of the rest is concerned with the protagonist's memories of family trips there. Although the protagonist's family was in a sense rooted in the "Mid-fucking-west," as his parents called it, those roots were not planted voluntarily--his parents were academics who were exiled there by the exigencies of the job market--and place in this novel is simply the scene of family drama rather than, as in Bridge of Sighs, a source of those forces that shape the family drama. The Griffins wanted out of Indiana, son Jack has only professional reasons for living first in Los Angeles (he is a screenwriter) and then in Connecticut (where he goes to teach screenwriting), and Cape Cod was significant to Jack' parents only because it represented the place in the social hierarchy they believed they should occupy. The Griffins couldn't even bring themselves to buy a house in their college town, preferring to rent out the houses of colleagues on sabbatical.

The Griffins eventually divorce, and most of That Old Cape Magic alternates between episodes in which Jack either reminisces about his parents and their eventual fates or attempts to deal with his still-living mother (while carrying around his recently deceased father's ashes in the trunk of his car) and episodes that essentially chronicle the process of his own marriage's failure. Where Bridge of Sighs is a soap opera of the small-town working class, That Old Cape Magic is a soap opera of the cosmopolitan middle class. If you think the psychological "turmoil" of a late-middle-aged screenwriter turned academic is the stuff of great drama, you may appreciate the novel, but if you'd rather that a novel have some aesthetic interest beyond the tedious recounting of curdled affluence, you will likely find it, as I did, quite a snooze (although of mercifully short duration, as Russo novels go).

The portrayal of the parents as academics with monstrous egos is presumably an instance of the "humor" of which so many reviewers of Russo's fiction take note, but it seems to me more vicious than funny, although I guess there's still a little entertainment value in the viciousness. Another example of Russo's humor must be a scene late in the book in which a man in a wheelchair finds himself upside down in a tree. This didn't seem cruel so much as an obvious attempt to inject "comedy" into a novel that otherwise doesn't have much. Some reviewers in emphasizing Russo's "humanity" speak of his "optimism," and I guess in ending more or less happily (the protagonist and his wife are cautiously reunited) That Old Cape Magic is optimistic, or "deep-hearted," but it really only reinforces the soap opera, although in this case not very effectively. Here the happy ending doesn't seem so much earned or unearned as also merely perfunctory. Since I didn't really understand what the problem with the protagonist's marriage was in the first place (something to do with his preoccupation with the past, I think), their reunion at the end seemed equally unaccountable.

In his review of Bridge of Sighs, Stephen Metcalf remarks that Russo is "among the least 'meta” writers going,' but there are, surprisingly enough, some "meta" elements in both of these novels. In Bridge of Sighs, Lucy Lynch reports to us that he is writing a memoir about his younger days, so presumably that memoir is the source of much of his narrative, although not all of it, and at times the narration switches to third-person accounts of both Sarah and Bobby Marconi, describing events at which Lucy cannot be present. In That Old Cape Magic, Jack Griffin writes a long story based on one of his family's summer stays at the Cape, which is presented as a more or less truthful rendition of events, as if it isn't a story at all, even though it is eventually published in a literary magazine as fiction. Later in the novel, his mother tells him on her deathbed a version of her life with his father he has not heard before, a story he calls the "Morphine Narrative" and which he assumes is fiction, but can't be sure. In both novels, then, we are given reasons to doubt the accuracy and reliability of the narratives we are reading--Is Lucy's version of events what really happened, or is it unavoidably colored by his retrospective self-interest? Are the third-person sections devoted to Sarah and Bobby actually being written by Lucy as well, speculating about their actions? If the morphine narrative is correct, does that make the story of Griffin's past as otherwise related through his possibly flawed perspective unreliable even beyond his already uncertain, filtered memories?

Unfortunately, while the novels inherently raise these questions, potentially adding an intriguing complexity to the narrative method, a judicious reading of each suggests that these interpolated narratives and narrative devices are to be taken at face value, as, in Bridge of Sighs, the immediate motivation of Lucy's story, but no more than the occasion of Lucy's retrospection and thus of the beginning of the novel we are reading, and, in That Old Cape Magic, a facet of the protagonist's professional life and a feature of the age of pharmaceuticals. In both novels, "writing" is beside the point beyond the fact it gets the story underway or helps it keep moving along. The "meta" elements are supplements to character and plot, not opportunities to provide aesthetic depth through a beneficial thematic ambiguity--or rather they are such opportunities but this case squandered ones.

In concluding her review of That Old Cape Magic, Elaine Showalter observes that, whatever the novel's virtues, they will manage "to keep most readers entertained until the movie comes out." I suspect that, as with other works of "literary fiction" that could easily enough be transformed into movie scripts, the movie versions of both Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic would probably be better than the novels. Indeed, I'm not sure why they weren't written as film scripts rather than novels, since there's very little in them that depends on the novel as a form for their appeal. Indeed, one can imagine them as "quirky" indy films or even "quality" Lifetime movies without much if any diminution of effect. Why reviewers so revere Russo as a serious novelist is a mystery to me.

 

Performing Its Own Self

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Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself.

Federman rejected both "metafiction" and "experimental fiction" more broadly as labels accurately describing his work, instead coining the term "surfiction" to sum up what he--as well as other innovative writers, such as Ronald Sukenick--was after. In his essay, "Surfiction--Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction," Federman defines the term:

. . .the only fiction that still means something today is that kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it: the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's imagination and not in man's distorted vision of reality--that reveals man's irrationality rather than man's rationality. This I call SURFICTION. However, not because it imitates reality, but becuase it exposes the fictionality of reality. Just as the Surrealists called that level of man's experience that functions in the subconscious SURREALITY, I call that level of man's activity that reveals life as a fiction SURFICTION.

I never really did quite get the last part of this formulation, that surfiction "reveals life as fiction." In the next paragraph, Federman adds: "fiction can no longer be reality or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY--an autonomous reality whose only relation to the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth." To "abolish the notion that reality is truth" is not, it seems to me, the same thing as revealing "life as a fiction." Denying that reality is the arbiter of "truth" does help to preserve the "autonomous reality" of fiction, but for fiction to be "a" reality, it would seem necessary that "reality" itself exist, to which fiction provides an alternative or a complement. If fiction is reality and life a fiction, then Federman is paradoxically valorizing realism after all, though not for "recreating" reality. Fiction is its own arbiter of truth, the realm where "life" is really to be found. This all seems a rather byzantine way to arrive at the conclusion that fiction is a creation, not a recreation of anything.

Indeed, if fiction is an act that "renews our faith in man's imagination," then it largely undermines the appeal to imagination to burden it with the task of rendering itself reality--unless you simply want to defend imagination as a process that's as real as any other human activity, and perhaps as revelatory of "life" as documentary-style realism. Certainly neither Double or Nothing nor Take It or Leave It themselves do very much to expose life as fiction, or, for that matter, "abolish reality." But they both do display the literarary imagination at its most adventurous through exploring "the possibilities of fiction" and by challenging " the tradition that governs it." It seems to me that these are impressive enough accomplishments that asking them further to disclose "man's irrationality" or to abolish reality only threatens to saddle them with extra philosophical weight they don't really need to bear.

The reader encountering Double or Nothing for the first time surely becomes most immediately aware of its inherent playfulness. Riffling through the book, one finds pages arranged in multiple shapes and irregular spacings, its words cascading here and there, printed in various fonts and shadings. Some pages don't so much contain writing as words arranged into images and pictographs. It is apparent right from the start that this is a work that challenges our assumption that when we pick up a novel we will be reading "prose" that unfolds through the usual, orderly blocks of print that define the reading experience in its most fundamental form. Both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, which is also typographically adventurous, can be read as prose narratives of a sort--albeit narratives preoccupied with their own narration--but they at a minimum require the reader to consider his/her expectations of reading and to forsake dependence on the usual and the ordinary.

If the reader begins with the impression that Double or Nothing will be a mischievous, thoroughoing challenge to the conventions that dominate the writing and reading of fiction, this impression should only be reinforced by the experience of the text itself, although that experience will surely exceed in its realization the pallid generalization of this description. The challenge of the novel is such that attentive readers will find it invigorating, an invitation to revise their notion of the reading experience as an essentially passive activity but also to find the kind of active reading it encourages a rewarding alternative. Above all, Double or Nothing is an entertaining novel, enjoyable to read in its very refusal to play by the rules.

The "plot" of Double or Nothing is announced--and more or less completed--in its opening lines:

Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lack himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facililities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York city, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person--a shy young man of about 19 years old--who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities, from France under the sponsorship of his uncle--a journalist, fluent in five languages--who had himself come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established, sometime during the war after a series of gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man--a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school--that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned. . . .

Immediately we are introduced in this passage to the structure and strategies that will be further elaborated throughout the text that is Double or Nothing. Though initially less radical than the typographical play still to come, the use of boldtype and italics here still seems disruptive, even arbitrary, although, as with all the other graphic devices in this novel, they actually work in part to substitute for more conventional grammatical and syntactical markers. The first boldfacing--"two or three weeks ago"--is clearly employed for humorous effect, but in general these interruptions provide a kind of rhythm and a different sort of visual orientation for a prose that otherwise abandons the traditional mechanics of prose.

The discursive situation set up here--a narrator relating the story of a writer preparing to write a story--is by now a recognizable move in postmodern writing, but in both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It Federman uses this trope more thoroughly than almost any other postmodern writer, and in addition integrates it more seamlessly with the theme motivating his narrative maneuvers. Each of these novels takes as its secondary subject--the primary subject being writing itself--episodes in the life of a French immigrant to America whose biography in most ways mirrors Raymond Federman's. In Double or Nothing, this character's story is being told, or being attempted, by a second character, the "rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man" who is also a seeming facsimile of Raymond Federman in his later incarnation as writer. The difficulty of "getting it right" in recounting the experiences of the "shy young man" becomes the novel's central conflict, memory and fiction unavoidably merging as the middle-aged author struggles to get the story told. The story of the story is not just self-reflexive sport (although it is that) but also the most honest opportunity to get at something close to "truth."

This is perhaps the truth that fiction can provide, but ulimately what a work like Double or Nothing dramatizes is that the "truth" of fiction lies not in its fidelity to external events but to its own necessities. Federman uses his own "life experiences" as material on which to perform the imaginative turns fiction always performs, but in Federman's case the performance is made "concrete," conducted on the page without disguise. Double or Nothing is the epitome of that modern/postmodern text that, in Jerzy Kutnik's words, "not so much says something about reality but, by its occurence and presence, does something as a reality in its own right." I would add to this that it is a literary text that is allowed to "be something" as well. In both its emphasis on "performance" and its ultimate status as an object of aesthetic perception, Double or Nothing is less a rendering of experience (at least as a realistic representation of "life") than it is an experience "in its own right." In its very refusal to accept the established practices determining where the "art" of fiction is to be found, Double or Nothing establishes itself as art in the most compelling way possible, by providing the reader with a unique aesthetic experience.

Although Take It or Leave It continues to experiment with the dynamics of the printed page in an approach similar to Double or Nothing, it is both more and less radical than its predecessor. It contains fewer word-pictures and other extreme acrobatic notational flourishes, but it also takes the self-reflexive portrayal of the fiction-writing process even farther. Kutnik begins to get at this feature of Take It or Leave It when he notes of the twentieth century novel in general that often "the question 'What does ficton say (mean)?' was replaced by the question 'How is fiction constituted?' as the focus of the writer's attention" (37). Take It or Leave It moves ahead in the life of the "shy young man" to a period in which he is serving in the U.S. military and focuses on a single episode in which he drives from North Carolina to upstate New York to collect his misdirected pay and from which he intends to drive across the country for further deployment. Although he does finally make it to the first destination, the relation of the second leg of the journey is permanently deferred as the narrative is punctuated by various digressions and a kind of internal drama carried out by multiple versions of the author, in this case split into three roles, as well as the implied reader.

In addition to the fictionalized Federman (for the purposes of this novel named "Frenchy") whose story is the ostensible subject of the novel, we are confronted with two different "tellers" of the story, one presumably an older Federman/Frenchy, who conveys the younger Frenchy's adventures to a second teller, who takes on the job of official narrator and who is the stand-in for Raymond Federman, author of Take It or Leave It. Later, the second teller leaves the narrative for a while, so that Federman/Frenchy must temporarily tell the story himself, and at another point the novels implied readers (residing in the future) intrude on the narrative by sending a proxy to see for himself what the young Frenchy is really up to.

In this way the actual reader of Take It or Leave It is exposed to a representation of "how fiction is constituted," or, as Kutnik puts it, to "the novel's internal space as the place where the text gets written, where it performs its own self" (202). Yet, this evocation of the "inner space" is also wildly funny, making Take It or Leave It in its way one of the most entertaining novels of its time. To me, it stands with Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew as a great "postmodern" novel that is great because, while rejecting the elements of fiction writing most familiar to most readers, it manages to substitute for those elements a strategy that such readers could still enjoy if they gave themselves over to its alternative logic. Like Mulligan Stew, Take It or Leave It provides readers with a "good read" that is "good" both because it makes for a pleasurable reading experience and because in the process it stimulates the reader to reflect on the conventions of reading--conventions that might otherwise exclude novels like these as simply curiousities.

At the same time that Take It or Leave It attempts to undermine the authority of conventional approaches to the writing and reading of fiction, it also evokes one of the first great novels in the tradition, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Both are narratives about the impossiblity of producing a narrative that doesn't leave out everything that's important. Both illustrate this dilemma by hilariously interrupting the narrative in progress through seemingly endless diversions and divagations. Sterne's novel at the very beginning of the modern history of fiction questioned the adequacy of "telling a story" as the justification of the form, and Take It Or Leave It renews that effort as provocatively as any work of fiction since.

Kerouac the Writer

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When I read On the Road for the first time, I didn't care for it much. I didn't exactly hate it, but I was disappointed by it. I had not at that time developed the suspicion of writers and novels alleged to be "saying something" that I now have, but I do recall being puzzled by the reputation--conveyed to me by fellow graduate students, I must say--this novel had of being a radical statement of postwar restlessness, or disaffected youth, or spiritual exhaltation, or whatever other urgent "content" On the Road was supposed to offer. I couldn't find any statements at all in it, although the characters certainly seemed restless, occasionally expressed disaffection (but not with the government or what could be conveniently labeled "the culture"), and at times appeared to be in a state of exhaltation (frequently drug- or alcohol-induced, but not always). The novels' style, as well, though obviously unconventional, did not at the time fulfill my expectations of what a transgressive style might accomplish.

In short, On the Road seemed rather tame to me, its rebellion more ingenuously earnest than hard-edged, and I read no further Kerouac for many years. Not too long ago, I decided to try reading On the Road again, expecting that I would quickly enough find it the same tepid experience as the first time around, that I would in fact probably stop reading it fairly early on and consign Kerouac permanently to the category of literary disappointments. However, although I can't say I immediately became entranced by it, I did not stop reading it. I did almost immediately judge the novel's protagonist, Sal Paradise, to be a more interesting character than I had previously, when he seemed to be mostly a cipher. Now I saw his restlessness as a genuine craving for experience, not affectation or pretense. At the same time, I found Dean Moriarty a less annoying character than I had the first time around, although I still wouldn't identify his appearances in the novel as necessarily among its highlights. I suspect that the reputation as an "outlaw" text to which I responded impatiently in my initial reading of On the Road, originates in an over-identification with Moriarty, who some readers took to be the novel's most important character. I think Sal Paradise is obviously the main character, and while Moriarty has his role to play in the intensification of Sal Paradise's immersion in experience, he does still too often come off as affected and pretentious, and future critics and scholars would do the novel a service by focusing more on the way his character reinforces the novel's formal and stylistic ambitions and less on his dubious deeds and spurious words of wisdom.

It was precisely the formal and stylistic qualities of On the Road that I eventually found myself appreciating more charitably on this second read. I think I originally experienced On the Road as essentially formless, even though I understood it was very loosely structured as a "picaresqe" narrative ("very loosely" being the characteristic I noticed most). What now seems clearer to me is the strategy by which Kerouac both enlists the picaresque strategy--which is often thought of as a kind of denial of form, although it really isn't--and fractures it even further to convey an impression of "spontaneous" action that the novel merely chronicles. On the Road invokes the journey motif associated with picaresque, but where most classic picaresque narratives present the journey as a serial, unbroken series of episodes that lead directly to journey's end, On the Road fragments the journey, leaves it off only to pick it up again, the episodes united only by the participation of Sal Paradise, who meets up with and then departs from the various characters who contribute to his effort of "going West to see the country," as he puts it in the novel's first paragraph. The novel thus can be taken as an experiment with the picaresque form specifically, but also as an effective application of "form" more generally.

I never really agreed with the criticism that as a stylist Kerouac at best exhibits a "plain" style or that, at worst, in his dependence on the declarative mode his is essentially a style without style. He does frequently employ the declarative mode, but this approach also prompts Kerouac to long, cumulative sentences that invoke a kind of lyricism:

In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New York in a bus coming back from a weekend in the mountains--chatter-chatter, blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I'd wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I've been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south, like something that can't get started. And I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

It's true that Kerouac's prose does not much incorporate traditional figurative language--more of which may be what I was looking for in my initial reading of On The Road--but sentence length and structure are as much a part of "style" as metaphor or simile, and Kerouac's style is not just dedicated to moving the story along. This passage doesn't so much move forward as it does spin in circles once the essential action--getting on the bus--is established. It might seem that Sal Paradise is impatient to get beyond the usual recording of scene--"chatter-chatter, blah-blah"--but Kerouac uses that impatience to motivate Sal's creation of an alternative way of writing that mosty avoids fancy phrasing and obligatory dialogue (although Kerouac's novels have plenty of dialogue--it's just not of the ornamental variety) without sacrificing an attention to language to the exigencies of plot. An examination of a passage such as this one also shows that Kerouac was not oblivious to the effects of pace, rhythm, and variety: the short first sentence of the paragraph sets up the expansive second sentence, which is followed by the still-lengthy but more an afterthought final sentence.

Kerouac famously described his method of composition as "spontaneous prose," designed to mimic the spontaneity of jazz musicians. I take Kerouac to be sincere in his desciption of the aims and nature of this method, and it seems to capture the real achievement of Kerouac's fiction. It is dangerous to impute "development" in Kerouac's work, since the publication dates and the dates of composition of his books are so much at variance. (On the Road was written in the late 40s, while the published follow-up, The Dharma Bums, was written in 1957, after many of the subsequently published novels.) However, it does seem to me that in reading Kerouac's novels in the order of their publication it is in The Subterraneans (published 1958) that we really see a more radical version of spontaneous prose. We can see it as early as the novel's second paragraph:

. . .I was coming down the street with Larry O'Hara old drinking buddy of mine from all the times in San Francisco in my long and nervous and mad careers I've gotten drunk and in fact cadged drinks off friends with such "genial" regularity nobody really cared to notice or announce that I am developing or was developing, in my youth, such bad freeloading habits though of course they did not notice but liked me and as Sam said "Everybody comes to you for your gasoline boy, that's some filling station you got there" or say words to that effect--old Larry O'Hara always nice to me, a crazy Irish young businessman of San Francisco with Balzacian backroom in his bookstore where they'd smoke tea and talk of the old days of the great Basie band or the days of the great Chu Berry--of whom more anon since she got involved with him too as she had to get involved with everyone because of knowing me who am nervous and many leveled and not in the least one-souled--not a piece of my pain has showed yet--or suffering--Angels, bear with me, I'm not even looking at the page but straight ahead into the sadglint of my wallroom and at a Sarah Vaughan Gerry Mulligan KROW show on the desk in the form of a radio, in other words, they were sitting on the fender of the car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street, Julien Alexander the Christlike unshaved thin youthful quiet strange almost as you or as Adam might say apocalyptic angel or saint of the subterraneans certainly star (now), and she, Mardou Fox, whose face when I first saw it in Dante's bar around the corner made me think, "By God, I've got to get involved with that little woman" and maybe too because she was Negro. . . .

The free-flowing disregard for sentence boundaries is very pronounced here, but this of course does not mean the passage lacks all structure or does not bear up under analysis. The fused clauses and phrases set up their own kind of rhythm, which can be heard if one reads the passage with care. The first three lines encourage us to read without pausing but the forced pause created by the quotation marks around "genial" allow us to catch our breath before moving on through the next two lines and arriving at the inserted nonrestrictive "in my youth." Since Kerouac otherwise so insistently abandons the comma in such a passage, we must assume that the commas here are quite intentional, a way of creating musical effect, a staccato-like phrase that lead to the different kind of variation provided by the quoted words from "Sam." Similar effects are created in the rest of the passage through the use of dashes, which also introduces digressions that reinforce the analogy with jazz improvisation, and additional inserted commas, parentheses, and quotation.

This stylistic strategy seems to me a genuine contribution to literary stylistics specifically and to American literature more generally. It also makes The Subterrraneans itself an important text both in postwar American fiction and American literature as a whole. Combined with the novel's relative brevity (in my copy, 111 pages), the "bop prosody" of The Subterraneans makes it a work at least as close to poetry as to "fiction" equated in the modern era with "storytelling," in which "style" is often enough just another element of "craft" when it isn't disregarded altogether. The Subterraneans is probably just as revelatory of the "underground" culture of the 1950s as anything else written during the era, but it is less likely to be regarded as a work whose documentary value exceeds its literary merit. On the Road will no doubt continue to be taken as Kerouac's signature work, but I now think The Subterraneans will be more highly regarded by future readers as an innovative work of prose.

The criticism frequently leveled at The Subterraneans, that it offers, through the character of Mardou Fox, a severly limited portrayal both of women and African-Americans will probably linger into the future as well, but while it is true enough that the novel's narrator, Leo Percepied, has a view of women and African-Americans constricted by his background and the era in which he lives, his affair with Mardou is inextricably linked to his desire for experience (a trait he shares with all of Kerouac's protagonists), which in this novel means an affinity with the "subterraneans" of the title and an immediate curiosity about Mardou, who most strongly evokes the "Other" for Percepied. The limitations of Percepied's assumptions about gender or race have to be balanced against his acceptance of a way of life not much in accord with the cultural norms his background and the era would have him affirm. I think most readers are/will be able to strike this balance.

One could argue that Mardou isn't really much developed as a character at all, as neither are any of the other characters in this novel, even, to some extent, Percepied. Our sense of knowing them only incompletely, however, is probably an unavoidable consequence of Kerouac's method in The Subterraneans. It is a novel less concerned with the delineation of character than with it narrator's response to his experience and its delineation in language.

"Might Not the Painted Knife Slip From the Painted Table?"

(As a pdf)

Steven Millhauser could not really be called a neglected writer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, his books are reviewed relatively widely and usually respectfully, and he has his share of admiring readers. But I don't think he has been sufficiently recognized as the important and accomplished writer he really is. Since the early 1970s, he has produced a series of novels and short fiction collections that easily rival the fiction of any of his contemporaries in their imaginative depth, stylistic vigor, and formal ingenuity.

Millhauser's novels Edwin Mullhouse, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler form a significant part of his body of work, each of them singular achievements that nonetheless display Millhauser's signature preocccupation with the processes of imagination and with protagonists who become obsessed, even possessed, by the need to explore the limits of their own perpetually active imaginations. Each of them provides a reading experience unlike any the reader is likley to recall, and each of them should be included on any list of superior American novels of the past thirty-five years. But in my view, Millhauser's short stories and novellas are even better and constitute the core of his achievement. While the longer form allows Millhauser to demonstrate the breadth of his inventive powers, the concentrated intensity of the shorter forms seems especially suited to his particular kind of storytelling.

Millhauser's fiction is a variation on the mode of postwar American fiction Robert Scholes labeled "fabulation" (Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979). According to Scholes, "Delight in design, and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer. . .serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist or satirist. Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy." The work of few other writers manifests in both its own formal patterns and its emphasis on protagonists with various kinds of of artistic ambitions as much "delight in design" as Steven Millhauser's. While the "joy" that this art produces doesn't always lead to fulfillment in life, Millhauser's characters are nevertheless fixated on perfecting their work and cultivating the satisfactions that only it is able to bring them.

A very good example of this sort of art-focused fabulation can be seen in "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a novella from the 1993 collection, Little Kingdoms. J. Franklin Payne is a newpaper cartoonist who begins to apply his talents to the then (1920) embryonic form of the animated cartoon. His efforts prove artistically successful, but as he explores the possibilities of this new medium, continuing to use thousands of individual drawings rather than adopt time-saving background cels, he finds his painstaking art already at odds with the increasingly commercial practices of the film business. Franklin remains faithful to his artistic vision and methods, even as his domestic life is falling apart and his wife leaves him. He completes his magnum opus, Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon, but by this time he is not only the work's one true audience but in fact its only audience, however much he might imagine others there "to applaud him in the warm and intimate dark."

Like most of Millhauser's fiction, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is partly about an individual human being with intensely focused creative impulses, and partly about the way those impulses are transformed into works of aesthetic beauty and complexity. LIke many of Millhauser's protagonists, Franklin Payne's imagination leads him to unorthodox expression, to forms, such as the animated cartoon, that allow for the transgression of realism and aesthetic convention. Franklin, we are told,

. . .felt the desire to accept a certain challenge posed by the artificial world of the animated drawings: the desire to release himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible. But this desire stimulated in him an equal and opposite impulse toward the mundane and plausible, toward precise illusionistic effects. As the violations of the real became more marked, the perspective backgrounds became fuller and more detailed; and as he gave way to impulses of wild, sweet freedom, he found himself paying close attention to he look of things in the actual world: the exact unfolding of metal steps at the top of a down escalator, the precise patterns of reflections in the panes of a revolving door seen from inside. . . .

This view of art's purchase on reality is in keeping with that delineated by Scholes in his section on "fabulation and reality":

Fabulation, then, means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality. Modern fabulation accepts, even emphasizes, it fallibilism, its inability to reach all the way to the real, but it continues to look toward reality. It aims at telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional.

The pursuit of "such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional" leads Millhauser in other stories to more openly experiment with form rather than narrate the stories of fictional characters such as Franklin Payne who themselves are driven to artistic experimentation. "Revenge," from Millhauser's 2003 book, The King in the Tree, is a good example of such an effort. It takes the form of a woman showing her house to a potential buyer, who is addressed throughout, in the first person, as "you": "This is the hall. It isn't much of one, but it does the job. Books here, umbrellas there. I hate those awful houses, don't you, where the door opens right into the living room. Don't you?" Gradually we learn the "buyer" is a woman who had a long-term affair with the narrator's now-dead husband and that the narrator is taking the occasion to exact a sort of revenge by informing the mistress of the damage her actions have inflicted. The narrator takes the mistress on a tour of each room of the house, in effect using them to present her (and us) with an anatomy of the narrator's life and marriage.

"The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" and "Revenge" show Steven Millhauser to be a writer of great inventiveness and storytelling prowess, one whose work emphasizes the wonders of artifice--including the artifice that is fiction--but also tempers our delight in its artifice by truthfully depicting the limitations of such artifice in its ultimate confrontation with the irresistable forces of reality. These qualities can be found in equally compelling measure in Millhauser's most recent collection of short stories, Dangerous Laughter (2008). The author's use of fabulation to evoke fantastic worlds is memorably evident in "The Dome," a Barthelmean story about the erection of domes above and around homes, towns, and eventually whole countries, "The Other Town," about a town that has replicated itself, creating an "other" town the citizens of the "real" town visit in order to give themselves a more vivid sense of its (and their) existence, and "The Tower," about the aftermath of a multi-generational effort to build a tower that "grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven."

The focus on artist figures perfecting their craft in their own visionary if idiosyncratic ways can be found in "In the Reign of Harad IV," which tells the story of a court miniaturist who is able to reduce the size of his miniatures to the point of invisibility, in "A Precursor of the Cinema," which relates the life and career of a painter able to create such realistic effects that his subjects can be seen moving on the canvas, even to leave the canvas altogether, and, in its way, in "The Wizard of West Orange," a story about Thomas Edison and his work on the "haptograph," a device that simulates tactile sensations. "Cat 'N' Mouse" is a verbal rendition of a Tom and Jerry-like cartoon, "History of a Disturbance" is a final communication from a man who has given up on words, while "Here at the Museum" is a docent's guide to the "New Past" on display at the institution named in the title.

"Real life" is portrayed more directly, if still with Millhauser's usual fanciful conceits, in "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" and "Dangerous Laughter." In the former, Elaine Coleman has indeed disappeared, although she has neither run away nor been abducted. She has simply ceased to exist, a condition that, as the story makes clear, essentially mirrors her circumstances when she ostensibly did exist. As the narrator of the story puts it, "If it's true that we exist by impressing ourselves on other minds, by entering other imagainations, then the quiet, unremarkable girl whom no one noticed must at times have felt herself growing vague, as if she were gradually being erased by the world's inattention." The latter story relates how a group of teenagers during summer vacation begin holding "laughing parties," in which all involved break out in willed laughter. (Later, the laughing parties are replaced with weeping parties.) One girl, Clara Schuler, proves particularly adept at laughing out loud (it may be her only talent), but when the laughing fad fades she holds one last party at her own home, after which "The local paper reported that Mrs. Schuler discovered her daughter around seven o'clock. She had already stopped breathing. The official cause of death was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, but we knew the truth: Clara Schuler had died laughing."

Both of these stories use fabulation as the best way to get at the reality experienced by those like Elaine Coleman and Clara Schuler, who feel marginalized and ignored, to find those "correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality." They don't allow escape from the world through simple fantasy but aim at "telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional."

Millhauser's most provocative fantasies generally explore explicitly the gray areas between art and reality. In Dangerous Laughter, the most striking example of such a story is "A Precursor of the Cinema." Harlan Crane is a "Verisimilist" painter whose invention of "animate" paint allows him to to take his paintings a step beyond realism to the kind of photographic illusion of the real achieved by film. According to the story's narrator (an art historian of sorts) "Harlan Crane's animate paintings are more unsettling still, for they move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception and have the general effect of radically destabilizing the painting--for if a painted fly may at any moment suddenly enter the room, might not the painted knife slip from the painted table and cut the viewer's hand?"

Part of the humor of the story (and there's almost always an embedded humor in Millhauser's fiction) is in in the narrator's matter-of-fact way of presenting Harlan Crane's "invention" as if the idea of animate paint were not manifestly ludicrous, but the notion that art can "move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception" in a move that has the effect of "radically destabilizing" the work is one that has resonance not just for the paintings of Harlan Crane but also for the fabulative fiction of Steven Millhauser. His fiction consistently moves "back and forth" between the world we think we live in and the invigorating deceptions with which it both warps and truthfully renders that world. It "destabilizes" our idea that these two things are incompatible if 'realism" is the goal.

Steven Millhauser is one of the remaining postmodernists (a late postmodernist, perhaps) still publishing vital, challenging work. Dangerous Laughter is a book long-time readers of Millhauser's fiction will certainly value, but also one that could provide readers less familiar with Millhauser a compelling introduction to that fiction. Although such readers will then want to turn to the previous books for a more complete appreciation of one of the best living American writers.

Updike--The Early Stories

(As as a pdf)

I

I have read many of the stories included in John Updike's The Early Stories before, but Updike has re-arranged them in the way in which he presumably now wants them to be read, the arrangement that will convey most felicitously what they have to offer us. The fresh connections this arrangement makes between the stories, whether written as early as 1953 or as late as 1975, must surely also make them, if not more meaningful, at least meaningful in a different way than when they are read in isolation, or even in their original published context.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the "Olinger stories," written between 1954 and 1961 and clearly based on Updike's own youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania. I have never really thought of Updike as an autobiographical writer per se. Although much of his fiction is clearly anchored by his own experiences first in Pennysylvania and ultimately in Massachusetts, many of his books are not autobiographical at all, taking as their subjects characters completely unlike John Updike--The Coup, Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick, In the Beauty of the Lilies, the Bech books. Even Rabbit Angstrom is obviously not an autobiographical character, however much some of his responses to his situation and his experiences might have come from Updike's familiarity with his mileu and his background.

The Olinger stories, however, are relentlessly autobiographical, so much so that when taken together their value as literary art, as fictional creations with full aesthetic integrity, is somewhat less than I expected it to be. One thing that even this initial section of The Early Stories begins to demonstrate is the price to be paid by a writer determined to survive simply as a writer, to have a "career" in fiction writing and not to either martyr himself in his poverty or take up a supporting career as professor or editor. The consequence is that some of the work is written as work, stories written to pay the bills or keep one's presence up but not necessarily because they were otherwise stories that just had to be written. Several of the stories in this section seem to me to be of this kind, written to first establish Updike's presence and then to help the writer earn his keep. There's nothing morally objectionable about this, but stories like the first one, "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You," a coming-of-age vignette similar to Joyce's "Araby," but much less accomplished, or "In Football Season," an equally slight reminiscence of high school football games, are perhaps interesting enough to read in charting the development of John Updike's career but surely won't stand the test of time as short stories.

As a whole, these stories revolve around the same set of characters, given different names in some of the stories, but clearly the same nevertheless: a young man with a tendency to brood and to speculate about what his life will be like, as well as with some latent talent as a writer or artist, his parents, the mother somewhat frustrated with her lot but also capable of enjoying life, a father stuck in a low-paying job as high school teacher and given to a fair amount of brooding of his own, which he hides in a facade of cheerfulness, sometimes one or more elderly grandparents, the boy's real connection to the past, the history of the community in which he lives. This is all clearly enough a version of John Updike's own family and their travails, of his own trajectory from small-town boy to aspiring writer. But the effort seems so intensely focused on recreating these circumstances and tracing that trajectory that one finishes these stories thinking more about John Updike's life and his desire to portray it in fiction than about the achievements of the stories in literary terms.

Probably the best-known story among the group of Olinger stories is "Pigeon Featherss," the title story of Updike's second collection, published in 1962. This is also a coming-of-age story (Updike seems fond of this conceit), in which the Updike character, in this case named David Kern, is seized with a kind of premature existential crisis. "Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. . . ." No doubt this is as well one of the earliest stories in which religious faith becomes a foregrounded theme, a theme that has led many critics to label Updike in part a "religious" writer. David's crisis is resolved in the story's conclusion, when, after ridding the family's barn of a group of pesty pigeons, David looks at one of the dead pigeons and "lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a contolled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him." David buries the pigeons, and as he finishes "crusty coverings were lifted from him" and "he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever." One wants to think there is some irony in this, that it is not being suggested that the slaughter of "these worthless birds" (pigeon as Christ figure?) is not necessary to save David's soul, but I, for one, have to conclude that this revelation is meant to be taken precisely as such, the pleasing lyricism of the passage notwithstanding.

In my opinion, the two best stories in this section are "The Persistence of Desire" and "The Happiest I've Been." In the former, the Updike stand-in, here called "Clyde Behn," returns to Olinger after a number of years and meets a former girlfriend. There is clearly unfinished business between the two of them, although they both understand why their relationship had to end. The ex-girlfriend, it seems, is willing to betray her husband for a sexual encounter with Clyde and leaves Clyde with a note: "The glimpse, through the skin of paper, of Janet's old self quickened and sweetened his desire more than touching her had. He had tucked the note back into his shirt pocket and its stiffness there made a shield for his heart. In this armor he stepped into the familiar street. The maples, macadam, shadows, houses, cars were to his violated eyes as brilliant as a scene remembered: he became a child again in this town, where life was a distant adventure, a rumor, an always imminent joy." The tone of regret and sorrow for things passed that runs through all of these stories is perhaps most effectively sounded here, an effect Updike achieves entirely through the aptness of phrasing and the rythmic ease of his language. "The Happiest I've Been" is an equally quiet story in which the narrator ("John") is a college sophomore about to drive back to school with a local friend. Before leaving they stop off at a party where the narrator meets up with some old acquaintances and eventually winds up sitting in a kitchen with a girl he doesn't know well but with whom he has a tender moment nevertheless: "She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds." This is all that happens, but it makes the narrator "happy" that she "had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me," as does his friend, Neil, as the narrator later drives away from Olinger. (We have also learned that "after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.")

The wistful quality that many of these stories seem to be after comes through most affectingly in these two stories because they're understated, don't try as hard as does even the staged epiphany in "Pigeon Feathers." The remaining Olinger stories perform variations on the themes of these two stories, to greater or lesser effect, but ultimately work, at best, to sketch out the overall portrayal of Olinger and its influence on David/Clyde/John Updike. In my view "The Persistence of Desire," "The Happiest I've Been," and perhaps "Pigeon Feathers" are the works that will continue to attract readers among this grouping of stories. (Also in my view, the essay-like "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car" just don't work at all.)

Throughout all of these stories, however, Updike's impressive prose style is in evidence, although it is here perhaps somewhat less florid, but also somewhat less assured, than it will later become. In addition to the passages I have already quoted, this paragraph, the opening paragraph of "In Football Season," shows Updike the pure stylist at his best:

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Some readers find Updike's style excessive, too intoxicated with the description of things, but I find it irresistable, the style of a writer trying to discover in all good faith what words can really say.

In many ways, the real culmination of the Olinger stories is Updike's novel The Centaur (1963). Perhaps because it was Updike's immediate follow-up novel to Rabbit, Run, in my opinion it really did not then and to some extent still has not received the credit it is due. Containing essentially the same cast of characters, this novel really completes the portrayal of Olinger and its place in Updike's fiction, and is the most compelling portrait as well of Updike's father (or at least of his fictional transformation.) The novel additionally shows Updike beginning to depart from strict conventional realism, as it alternates the story of the father and the son with a depiction of the father as literally a centaur, the mythological creature who is half man and half graceful beast. It really is a completely successful novel, and it is to be hoped that in the future it acquires the many readers it deserves.

II

The second set of stories in John Updike's The Early Stories is a more miscellaneous grouping, united only very loosely through their characters' shared circumstance of being ""Out in the World," as this section's title has it. Whereas the first section, "Olinger Stories," (a discussion of which can be found here) is worth reading as a whole because of its portrayal of Olinger (a fictionalized version of Updike's home town), the second can probably be read selectively, focusing on the better stories and skipping over the less substantial. I will try to identify what seem to me to be the better stories, and perhaps suggest how these stories might be read within the context of Updike's then developing career as a writer.

The characters in this group of stories, most of them still recognizably some transformed version of Updike himself (or at least of Updike and his experiences taken as representative of certain kind of postwar American, an aspirant to the educated middle class), are "out in the world" as students, as recent college graduates, as husbands starting families, or in some way getting an idea (in at least one case, not getting it) of what the world "out there" is really like. Like the Olinger stories, these stories were all written between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, and if one were to judge by these first two sections of The Early Stories, it would seem that Updike set out to be a writer who would chronicle the coming-of-age and the subsequent experiences of that generation of Americans who were born before World War II but came to maturity and adulthood in the immediate postwar period. In Updike's case this also entails chronicling the journey from small-town America and its assumptions to those of the more "wordly" suburbs and cities.

Some of the stories are slight and, in my opinion, readers could safely pass on them: "The Kid's Whistling,""Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow," A Trillion Feet of Gas," Dear Alexandros, and "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" would fit into this category. "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town" and "His Finest Hour" are worth reading, but are ultimately fairly recognizable kinds of maturation stories (the latter confronting its married protagonists with the reality of domestic violence just next door) that, after promising beginnings, more or less disappoint by the end. One group of stories--"Dentistry and Doubt," "A Madman," "Still Life," and "Home"--portray their student protagonist's visit to and return from England, but only the last, which concerns this character's return and the beginnings of his readjustment to "home" and career, could really be classified as among Updike's more compelling stories.

This leaves "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," "The Christian Roommates,""The Doctor's Wife," and "Ace in the Hole" as the cream of this crop. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" depicts an episode between a young male schoolteacher (still somewhat earnest and unsuspecting) and what he assumes to be a female student with a crush on him. (She is caught conspicuously passing a note that expresses her love for him.) It turns out, however, that this girl has been buttering up all of her teachers, and it is the protagonist who indeed winds up crushed. After discovering her strategem, "Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that." (This latter is a repetition of the same thought he had had upon confronting the girl with the note) Many of Updike's stories end with these epiphanic moments of truth, but this is a story in which that moment is particularly affecting.

"The Christian Roommates" is finally less effective as a story, but is remarkable for the current of barely concealed homoeroticism that runs through it. Otherwise a more or less conventional story of "the college experience," it presents probably the most naive and sheltered character in this group of stories, Orson Ziegler, who "came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor," confronted with his assigned roommate, "Hub" Palamountain, an unconventional fellow of a sort Orson certainly has never before encountered. Orson comes to hate Hub, but the hate clearly enough hides a simultaneous attraction. It all comes to a climax, so to speak, when Hub steals a parking meter and brings it into their room. Orson is scandalized and the two of them finally have it out: "Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub's body stiffened. . . Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor. . .He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. . .Hub's body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip. . .Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. . .He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub's body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. . . ." By today's wised-up standards, this scene has a barely suppressed hilarity about it, but Updike's language is clear enough to conclude he knew what he was doing.

"The Doctor's Wife" in a sense takes us farthest "out in the world," to an out-of-the-way Caribbean island where a young American family is vacationing. The doctor and his wife are permanently resident caucasians, and the story impressively enough depicts some of the racial tensions being felt during the early 60's. (As, in its way, does "The Christian Roommates.") The doctor's wife has come to have the attitude of the white colonialist toward the black inhabitants of the island ("Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don't know how unnatural these people are"), and at the end of the story she tells the American husband that the locals think his own wife's "good tan" means she is "part Negro." The husband is left brooding on his own reaction to this: "She [his wife] would have wanted him to say something like yes, her great-grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that his imaginary scenarios depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious white pride; he and the doctor's wife were in this together."

The most noteworthy story among the "Out in the World" group may be "Ace in the Hole," and not just because it is clearly a precursor to Rabbit, Run. It is an interesting and accomplished story in its own right, perhaps the most successful of those stories (so far) in which Updike tries to move beyond his own experiences and create a protagonist who is not merely a fictional persona. Like Rabbit Angstrom, Ace is a former high school basketball hero no longer in the spotlight. But unlike Rabbit, Ace Anderson seems only obliquely aware that his glory has irretrievably faded, and although he clearly is just drifting through his life as depicted in the story, he can't quite let go of the happy-go-lucky attitude of his basketball days. The story ends with a confrontation between Ace and his wife (Eve) that doesn't bode well for the future, reinforcing the uneasiness Ace has been feeling of late: "He wasn't hungry; his stomach was tight. It used to be like that when he walked to the gymnasium alone in the dark before a game. . .But once he was inside, the locker room would be bright and hot, and the other guys would be there, laughing and towel-slapping, and the tight feeling would leave. Now there were whole days when it didn't leave."

What Ace Anderson lacks is Rabbit's self-awareness that his life has become tragic in an archetypally American way. Having made it to the top so early (and under such unavoidably consticted circumstances), Rabbit isn't likely to have another chance, and his horror at this prospect is what gives Rabbit, Run its sense of urgency and inescapable failure. Ace is less astute than Rabbit, and it's unlikely that as written his character could have developed the alertness to his situation that made it possible for Rabbit to be the center of a full-length novel. But the very qualities that distinguish Ace from Rabbit still illuminate for us the realities of American life Updike seems to be exploring in both "Ace in the Hole" and Rabbit, Run. In the one case a growing sense of quiet desperation that will probably remain muted, in the other a prolonged outcry against the conditions that create that desperation in the first place.

III

Probably it will be John Updike's "domestic fiction" for which he will be best remembered and perhaps on the basis of which he will be judged as a writer. And indeed "The Married Life," the third section of The Early Stories, provides the most provocative and most consistently accomplished set of stories in this book so far. (For a discussion of the first two, go here and here.) Of the fourteen stories in this section, probably only "The Crow in the Woods" and "Wife-Wooing" fail to reward a careful reading.

Which is not to say these stories are unequivocally agreeable, without their disturbing qualities. The portrayal of marriage that emerges probably has at least as many shadows as warm light, although that is ultimately what makes them seem more honest than not and gives them the dramatic tension they need to succeed as short stories. The underlying assumptions about gender roles can at times seem questionable--again the majority of the stories were written in the 1950s and early 1960s--as can some of the attitudes toward unfolding political and cultural changes that are at times expressed or at least implicitly suggested. However, many of these problematic features can be interpreted as inherent in the circumstances and the mindsets of the characters themselves, whose assumptions and actions are precisely the focus of Updike's depiction of marriage in postwar America.

Most of the stories in "The Married Life" are in the form of vignettes or isolated episodes, episodes that nevertheless reveal much about the characters and their moments of heightened awareness of the pain and toil involved in married life. It is a form that Updike handles well (and that he had perfected long before it was taken up by the minimalists and neorealists of the 1970s and 1980s), seems perfectly suited to the disclosure of small insights Updike seems to be after, and that also allows him to exercise his stylistic gifts in a way that can transform the stories into something like lyrical set-pieces. (Readers will of course have greater or lesser tolerance for fiction of this kind.) Even the slighter stories have these kinds of lyrical moments, as in the conclusion to "The Crow in the Woods": "Something happened. Outdoors a huge black bird came flapping with a crow's laborious wingbeat. It banked and, tilted to fit its feet, fell toward the woods. His heart melted with alarm for the crow, with such recklessness assaulting an inviolable surface, seeking so blindly a niche for its strenuous bulk where there was no depth. It could not enter. Its black shape shattering like an instant of flak, the crow plopped into a high branch and sent snow showering from a sector of lace. Its wings spread and settled. The vision destroyed, his heart overflowed. . . ."

Perhaps the very best story of this type in the group at hand is "Unstuck." The story can be easily summarized: A married man wakes up to find that a heavy snowfall has occured overnight. He goes outside to dig his car out from under a snow bank that has hemmed it in. Unable to do so, he enlists his wife to help him. They succeed. The story begins by telling us of the husband and wife that "They had made love last night and again she had failed to have her climax." Later: "She wanted to make a holiday of it. And she wanted, he thought, to bury the aftertaste of last night." In the story's conclusion, the wife has navigated the car out of its snowbank: "[The car's] driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing. . .Mark shouted 'Great!' and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. . .He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, 'You were great.' He was still panting. She rosily smiled and said, 'So were you.'" The not-so-subtle humor of the sexual suggestions here are nicely balanced, at least in my reading of the story, by the authentic generosity of the wife's words, making the story itself the most generous vision of the rewards of marriage in this section of the book.

This generosity toward her husband is shared by Joan Maple, wife of Richard, the two of whom are featured in a series of stories from the 1960s and 1970s chronicling the break-up of their marriage. Five of these stories are featured in "Married Life": "Snowing in Greenwich Village," which introduces the couple, and the four concluding stories in this section, "Giving Blood," "Twin Beds in Rome," "Marching Through Boston," and "Nakedness." Taken individually, these are not necessarily the best stories in part III of The Early Stories, but collectively they are probably the most significant of these fictions when considering the development of Updike's career as a whole. They clearly serve a dual purpose: to give an account of the difficulties of marriage in America, but also to register the social cultural changes in postwar life that contributed to these difficulties.

It is a good thing for Richard and Joan Maple's marriage that Joan exhibits some generosity of spirit, some forebearance and acceptance, since Richard Maple doesn't himself possess many such characteristics. The stories, although told in the third-person, are deflected through Richard's central consciousness, and while this technique almost always creates some initial bond between character and reader, it isn't long before this bond is frayed and Richard comes to seem a frightened and insecure man with some very unpleasant habits and assumptions. He's inclined to be patronizing toward his wife, mostly because he's the man and she's the woman, but he also comes to be envious of her, almost afraid. Joan takes the social changes of the 1960s in stride, attempting to accomodate herself to them, but Richard does so with great reluctance, sometimes out of jealousy that Joan's increased activism is taking her away from him, and frequently lashing out because of it. His racial attitudes and his contempt for "liberals" like his wife come to seem unsavory indeed. Some readers might be inclined to think that Richard's attitudes are given too much prominence, suggesting they might be shared by the author himself, but Updike elsewhere, particularly in the Rabbit books, has demonstrated his ability to explore the mindset of characters whose views he himself does not share, and the portrait of Richard Maples that emerges from these stories finally comes off, to this reader, at least, as an honest attempt to present such a character from the inside, so to speak, to depict Richard Maples the middle-class American male of this period as authentically as possible.

"Snowing in Greenwich Village" shows Richard already, early in the marriage, not entirely comfortable in the role of young husband, as in this story he escorts a dinner guest back home, going up to her apartment and at story's end obviously tempted to take things further. "Giving Blood" begins "The Maples had been married nine years, which is almost too long," and shows the marriage to be indeed quite fragile. "Twin Beds in Rome" begins this way: "The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy." The couple's vacation in Rome perhaps momentarily revivifies the marriage, but Richard's bad faith (in a noxious alliance with his genuine love for his wife) is sufficient to guarantee that this reprieve won't last long. "Marching Through Boston" and "Nakedness" most directly chronicle the Maple marriage in conflict with social change, in the former case the civil rights movement and in the latter the sexual revolution. "Marching Through Boston" casts Richard in an especially ugly light, as his latent bigotry is exposed quite explicitly, although some of his vilest words are clearly enough spoken in his own protest against the changes taking place in his relationship with his wife. (The story literally narrates Richard's participation with Joan in a civil rights march in Boston. It only drives them farther apart.)

What these Maple stories most memorably offer is a representation in fiction of the way in which the neuronal threads constituting the male psyche, perhaps reinforced by that patriarchal cultural climate of the 1950s, began to unravel during the 1960s and 1070s. This unsettling of gender roles and perspectives is further reflected in such stories as "Sunday Teasing" and "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" (A parallel kind of turmoil in racial perspectives can be seen in the story "A Gift from the City," perhaps the most direct confrontation with these kinds of changes.) The male characters in these stories are not completely aware of the way in which their assumptions are being overturned, and perhaps Updike himself could not have entirely recognized the long-term consequences of those social forces causing the marital tension he was attempting to depict in these stories. Perhaps all of this makes the fiction collected in "Married Life" at least as interesting for sociological as for aesthetic reasons. But in all of the ways I have indicated, most of the stories as well show Updike's talent for writing poetically insightful short fiction coming to be confirmed, the WASP-y, middle-class focus on marital matters notwithstanding.

IV

The two middle sections in John Updike's The Early Stories, "Family Life" and "The Two Iseults" offer a grab-bag assortment of stories united by the shared subjects of family and/or marriage, the latter increasingly portrayed as a locus of dissatisfaction and betrayal, of real but fleeting pleasures and of dashed hopes. There are two more Maple stories, "Eros Rampant" and "Sublimating," which cast these themes in the starkest relief, but most of the other stories as well work, to the extent they do work, to sketch a collective image of midcentury family life in suburban America.

Perhaps the most representative stories in this middle part of the book are two that serve as bookends of a sort for the two sections, "The Day of the Dying Rabbit" and "I Will not let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me." The first simply depicts a family vacation in a "five-room shack" to which the family retreats every summer, this one ultimately memorable for the incident named in the title (the family cat brings in a baby rabbit that finally can't be saved), but it in turn only serves to fix in place this particular vacation as a kind of emblem of the quiet joys of family life. The father and narrator, a photographer, wonders aloud: "What was it in the next twenty-four hours that slowly flooded me, that makes me want to get the day on some kind of film?" He answers his own question at the end of the story, as the narrator and his son are paddling their way across a pond back to the shack, about to strike land: "The days since have been merely happy days. This day was singular in its, let's say tone, its silver-bromide clarity. Between the cat's generous intentions and my son's lovingly calm warning, the dying rabbit sank like film in the developing pan, and preserved us all." The story works because it is fully dramatized (unlike some other other stories in these sections) and because it works out its structural metaphor (story as photo) with a satisfying aesthetic logic, allowing the story to avoid sentimentality. The dying rabbit introduces an element of tragedy into the "happy days" of family life, but, like the day itself, the rabbit's very suffering gets preserved as a kind of testimonial to all of life's realities.

"I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me" is an equally simple but amply realized story that focuses on a farewell party being held for a couple about to move from their Connecticut suburb to Texas. In this awkward transition period, "The familiar lulling noises--car horn and dog bark, the late commuter train's slither and the main drag's murmur--had become irritants, the town had unravelled into tugging threads of love. Departure rehearses death." At the party, the husband dances with a woman the story clearly intimates is a former adulterous lover, her stony indifference to him now both a painful reminder of what they once meant to each other and a telling sign (to readers) of the malaise into which the husband and wife have fallen and from which they are fleeing. The story's closing dialogue captures this fatigue quite nicely:

 

Safely on the road, Lou asked, "Did Maggie kiss you goodbye?"
"No. She was quite unfriendly."
"Why shouldn't she be?"
"No reason. She should be. She should be awful and she was." He was going to agree, agree, all the way to Texas.
"She kissed me, Lou said.
"When?"
"When you were in the bathroom."
"Where did she kiss you?"
"I was standing in the foyer waiting for you to get done admiring yourself or whatever you were doing. She swooped out of the living room."
"I mean where on you?"
"On the mouth."
"Warmly?"
"Very. I didn't know how to respond. I'd never been kissed like that, by another woman."
"Did you respond?"
"Well, a little. It happened so quickly."
He must not appear too interested, or even to gloat. "Well," Tom said, "she may have been drunk."
"Or else very tired," said Lou, "like the rest of us."

Unfortunately, many of the other stories in these two sections are very slight and expose some of Updike's weaknesses as a writer. Too often he relies on lyricism to raise his subjects to a level of profundity they just can't reach on their own, as in "The Morning," literally a story about mornings: "At moments his dull attention caught, like a slack sail idly filling, a breath, from this multifaced horizon, of the hope that set in motion and sustained so many industrialized efforts, so much commercial traffic, such ingenious cross-fertilization of profit, such energetic devotion to the metamorphosis of minerals, the transport of goods. . . ." The same lyricism that breathes life into Updike's characters and their situations in his best stories here just goes blowing off into nowhere.

And too many of the stories are really just excuses for rather cloying reflections on the various aspects of family life. Among these would be "The Family Meadow" (you can guess its subject), "Plumbing," "The Orphaned Swimming Pool," "Son," "Daughter, Last Glimpses of," "Solitaire," and "Leaves." Other stories--"How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time," The Music School," "Museums and Women," "Four Sides of One Story"--are "experiments" in chronology or perspective or presentation as alternatives to scenic or episodic realism, but in my view they only suggest that Updike is much more skilled at this kind of realism. One understands why a writer like Updike would attempt such experiments--for a little variety, if nothing else--but most of these stories seem to me, at least, more a consequence of the need to keep churning out short stories than a real interest in literary experimentation.

It must also be said that in some of Udike's fiction the overall characterization of women can be unpleasant, bordering on the misogynistic. In "The Stare," a woman initially defined by her "blunt and elusive" demeanor is further described in this way: "In the months that unfolded from this, it had been his pleasure to see her stare relax. Her body gathered softness under his; late one night, after yet another party, his wife, lying beside him in the pre-dawn darkness of her ignorance, had remarked with the cool, fair appraisal of a rival woman, how beautiful she--she, the other--had become, and he had felt, half dreaming in the warm bed he had betrayed, justified. Her laugh no longer flashed out so hungrily and her eyes, brimming with the secret he and she had made, deepened and seemed to rejoin the girlishness that had lingered in the other features of her face. Seeing her across a room standing swathed in the beauty he had given her, he felt a creator's, a father's pride." The masculine vainglory here is pretty unattractive, and although the exposure of such male conceit seems built into Updike's project as a writer, there are times when one wonders whether some authorial condescension isn't seeping through, nevertheless.

V

Section six of John Updike's The Early Stories gathers together fourteen stories set in the fictional town of Tarbox, Massachusetts (although in several of the stories the town's name is never mentioned.) Readers looking for a supplementary depiction of the suburban town that also serves as the setting for Updike's novel Couples (1968) are likely to be disappointed with these stories..

The first four stories in this section--"The Indian," "The Hillies," "The Tarbox Police," "The Corner"--do provide some extra coloring beyond what one would find in Couples, but these "tales" are really sketches more than they are fully dramatized short stories, and as much as anything they seem to be the vehicles for Updike's musings on the changes being wrought on a town like Tarbox during the "turbulent" late 1960s and early 1970s. Several of the other stories--"Lifeguard," "The Deacon," "The Carol Sing," "Believers"--are better examples of Updike's treatment of religion and religious belief than they are of "Tarbox Tales," stories about middle-class suburban life. I am probably not the best judge of Updike's "religious" fiction, since in the main I find it obvious and heavy-handed right from the start, even though I know that scholarly articles and books have been written about the centrality to his work of Updike's own Karl Barth-derived religious beliefs. I actually much prefer the stories about suburban malaise and serial adultery. "Lifeguard" is probably the best of this group, as it also introduces the preoccupation with sins of the flesh to be found in many of Updike's novels.

There are two Maple stories in this section, "The Taste of Metal" and "Your Lover Just Called," although it isn't clear to me why these are included as Tarbox Tales while the others are not. They are in fact two of the better stories about this ultimately doomed marriage, as they focus on the relational dynamics and sexual restlessness of the Maple marriage rather than linking the couple's problems in a too facile way to the social transformations going on around them as perhaps some of the other Maple stories do.

For most readers, then--and for me--the most significant story in "Tarbox Tales" is probably "A & P." Easily Updike's most anthologized story, its first-person narrative tells the deceptively simple story of the protagonist's coming of age as he, a checkout boy in the grocery store named in the title, watches the reaction of the Tarbox residents ("the sheep") to the appearance of a sexually uninhibited, scantily clad young lady in the store one day. The story's conclusion, relating the immediate aftermath of the narrator's resignation after he has taken the girl's side (for reasons beyond the obvious one) against his employer, is justly famous: "I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the second slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in." And we understand that the narrator, Sammy, is correct: the world will be hard on him. The story is not just an account of adolescent rebellion but indeed a meditation on the unavoidable turning-points in life. The present-tense narration still seems powerful in its immediacy, even though the use of the present tense among current neorealist writers has become something of a commonplace. (Updike should probably be held accountable for this phenomenon only to the extent that he really was a pioneer of the technique, here and in Rabbit, Run.)

(The last selection in "Tarbox Tales," the brief poem-story "Eclipse," although it is not narrated in the present tense, also dramatizes a turning-point in its protagonist's life. The narrator comes to his own kind of realization during an eclipse, which Updike handles in a subtle and satisfying way. I would identify this story, along with "A &P," as the two really indispensable stories in this section of the book.)

Those wishing to experience Updike's portrayal of Tarbox, the otherwise rather nondescript New England town going through its own kind of turmoil during the 1960s, will thus probably have to turn to Couples. Although I wouldn't necessarily rank it at the very top among Updike's novels, I have now read this novel twice, and each time I thought it provocative and convincing, despite the critics who scorned it at the time of its publication. It's interesting partly as a period piece, but it also shows (along with a few of the stories in "Tarbox Tales") John Updike discovering what, in my opinion, is still his most interesting and most enduring subject.

VI

In contrast to the two previous sections of the book, there are in the final two sections of John Updike's The Early Stories, "Far Out" and "The Single Life," many very good short stories, perhaps a couple of great ones. It is a pity, however, that these stories are reserved for the concluding pages, as some readers may have already given up on reading the whole book because of the lesser work to be found in its middle sections and will miss out on some of Updike's more satisfying work in the short story form.

"The Astronomer" is one of Updike's better explicitly "religious" stories, relating, in an efficiently compressed way, a brief episode dramatizing the not-so-disaparate-after-all views of the scientist and the theologian. "The Witnesses" and "A Constellation of Events" present the adultery story in which Updike so frequently specializes from perspectives different than the usual, the latter focusing on the woman's point of view for a change. "Ethiopia" and "I am Dying, Egypt, Dying" are stories of Americans visiting Africa, and are worth reading for the insight they provide into the American response to its "natives." "The Bulgarian Poetess" is the first of the Henry Bech stories, but, although a perfectly good story, it probably doesn't really belong in this collection. "Separating" and "Gesturing" more or less bring the saga of the unsuccessful Maple marriage to its conclusion.

"Transaction" is the longish but suprisingly compelling story of an evening's encounter between a "man of forty" and a prostitute. It proves to be an unexpectedly profound experience for the man of forty, as "Always, until now, [sex] had been too much, bigger than all systems, an empyrean as absolute as those first boyish orgasms, when his hand would make his soul pass through a bliss as dense as an ingot of gold. Now, at last, in the prime of life, he saw through it, into the spaces between the stars." "Problems" is one of Updike's most successful formal experiments, a brief story of, again, adultery, told entirely in the form of a mathematics test.

In my view, the two best stories in the final sections, both perhaps among Updike's very best, are "The Hermit" and "Killing." The first very quietly tells the story of a man who, in the gradual dissatisfaction he has come to feel for his life, finds an old shack in a deserted track of woods and withdraws into solitude. As much as he wants to escape from the troubles and frustrations of the world he's left behind, however, the story depicts the ultimate impossibility of doing so. Updike establishes a kind of empathy with this character (authorial empathy) that I, at least, found rather surprising. "Killing" relates the story of a daughter coming to terms with the death of her invalid father, which she herself has had to oversee, and it does so very effectively indeed.

My final judgment of this book is that, although it contains numerous very good stories, stories on which Updike's ultimate reputation will certainly in part be assessed, as a book it is not a very satisfactory presentation of Updike's skills. Far too many of the stories are throw-aways (the second half of "Far Out," for example, consists of a series of overly cute exercises in whimsy that are, frankly, not worth the bother), and the order Updike has given them doesn't particularly do them credit or force us to consider him as a writer of short fiction in any new and more illuminating light. It is a book that probably ought to exist (as a convenience for scholars and critics, perhaps), but is not something that even Updike's fans need to read with any great urgency. Updike's talents as a writer of stories will be much better served when a "Selected Stories" ulimately appears, one that would include probably only a third to a half of the stories to be found in The Early Stories, 1953 -1975.

If anything, the casual reader is likely to find the book frustrating if not counterproductive as a way of sampling Updike's shorter fiction. I myself still think that Updike has a lot to offer as a stylist, and even occasionally as a writer willing to stretch the limits of form in fiction (although this he does more satisfactorily in the novels, novels such as The Centaur or The Coup, Roger's Version or Brazil). There's no doubt, however, that he can also belabor certain subjects beyond their aesthetic usefulness, and that a long career spent actually earning a living as a writer of fiction has resulted in a fair number of short stories that seem motivated primarily by the need to keep churning them out. This latter problem, on the other hand, is one most writers would gladly welcome if it meant being able to also produce fiction of higher quality and care through the literary livelihood thus provided. John Updike is certainly in the final analysis a writer who has produced such fiction, even if one does have to pick and choose when surveying his very large body of work.

Disassembling Donald Barthelme

(As a pdf)

(This essay originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

I never really understood why Donald Barthelme chose to re-publish his stories in collected, compendium editions, first in Sixty Stories and then in Forty Stories. The very titles of these books obscured the playful and distinctive signposts provided by the original volumes in which these stories appeared, bearing as they did such colorful, and ultimately revealing, titles as Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. (Some of the later titles—City Life, Sadness—were more elegantly succinct, but they also signified a thematic association among the included stories that is lost, and to some degree impoverishes the reader’s response, when the stories are reprinted in an omnibus form.) More importantly, what encountering Barthelme’s fiction in these collected volumes, the latest of which, Flying to America, includes all of the stories not found in the first two, really threatens to de-emphasize—or even eliminate—is the more carefully calibrated iconoclasm, the redoubled assault on convention, that one experiences when reading Barthelme’s stories in their original book-bound form.

Presumably, Barthelme reprinted in Sixty Stories the stories he most wanted to highlight. To this extent, these must have been what Barthelme (or Barthelme and his editor) considered the “best” of what is now apparently his 145 short stories (forty-five are included in Flying to America). Likewise, it must be presumed that the 40 stories of the second volume were second-tier stories of a sort, while the remainder as collected in this new volume unfortunately must be counted as Barthelme’s least essential efforts. If this is not the impression that Barthelme, and now the editor of Flying to America, Kim Herzinger, wanted to convey, it nevertheless does seem an unavoidable consequence of these publishing decisions. As I read the stories in Flying to America, some of them are indeed failed experiments, others simply not fully realized (always a potential hazard with short fiction as inveterately risk-taking as Barthelme’s). But others are Barthelme stories I would not want to be without—”Edward and Pia,” “The Big Broadcast of 1938″—and it seems to me a very unhappy fate for these stories that they in effect remain buried in a volume that is likely to be regarded, should these omnibus collections become the only point of access to his work, as containing Barthelme’s least substantial pieces.

Certainly not all of the stories to be found in either Sixty Stories or Forty Stories are gems either, although this is more a function of Barthelme’s relentlessly experimental approach than it is a judgment on his skills as a writer. Though there is something identifiably Barthelmean in all of his stories—a voice, a familiarity with many different cultural domains, a comedian’s sense of timing and effect—what characterizes his body of work as a whole is an always adventurous determination to reconceive the form and the discursive assumptions of the short story as inherited by mid 20th-century writers. Rarely does Barthelme stick to a previously employed method or device (with the possible exception of the “dialog” stories—stories written entirely in dialog—that Barthelme wrote throughout his career but especially in the mid-to-late ’70s). One of the pleasures of reading Barthelmes’ stories as they appeared, both in The New Yorker and in the subsequent books, was anticipating what new challenge to our assumptions about the nature of the short story Barthelme would offer. Many of these stories were indeed among the most innovative works of fiction in a period marked by a renewal of innovation by American fiction writers, but inevitably Barthelme’s insistent experimentalism would provide hits and misses, failed experiments as well as transformative triumphs.

The opportunity to witness this process of experimentation with the conventions of fiction, however, may be lost to future Barthelme readers (except for those intrepid few who resolve to recreate the process as adequately as possible by tracing it through the collected volumes, reading each story in order of publication). These readers will encounter stories from every period in Barthelme’s writing career indiscriminately mixed together, many of them no doubt still provoking the surprise and wonder that their original readers experienced, but others inevitably more disappointing, their strangeness less well-tempered absent the context provided both by the original volumes and by the ongoing course of his development as a writer. For some, no doubt, focusing attention on an author’s most successful work would seem only the most sensible way to sample that author, but in Barthelme’s case I would argue it is at least as important to gain a broader perspective on the direction in which his fiction sought out its own possibilities.

Regrettably, a book like Flying to America allows neither for the presentation of Barthelme’s lasting work nor for a survey of his experimental evolution. The 45 stories are, as far as I can tell, arranged according to no particular view of the trajectory of his career; nor is any particular sense of thematic or formal progression evident. (Herzinger’s preface provides a few brief and very general remarks about the “aesthetic and cultural issues that engaged Barthelme throughout his writing career,” but otherwise does not explain why we are reading the stories in the order in which they’re re-presented.) Indeed, the very first story in Barthelme’s very first book, “Florence Green Is 81,” appears as the next-to-last selection in Flying to America, immediately prior to “Tickets,” the last of his stories to be published in The New Yorker (in 1989), a choice that does not seem to me to reflect much concern for an informed consideration of Barthelme’s work. “Florence Green” is not one of Barthelme’s very best stories, but anyone who really wants to understand where Barthelme started as a published writer should in fact begin with this story. Given “Florence Green’s” place as the first story of Barthelme’s first collection, readers ought to be able to evaluate its influences and preoccupations as the keynote among Barthelme’s stories it actually is, not as a disassociated story hidden at the end of a third-string collected volume.

And “Florence Green is 81″ does provide significant insight into Barthelme’s clearly unconventional brand of fiction. In a book (Come Back, Dr. Caligari) that conspicuously heralds an approach to fiction radically different from that which had dominated American fiction in the 1950s, “Florence Green Is 81″ offers us a writer uninterested in the usual methods of short story composition—methods emphasizing narrative continuity, consistency of character, thematic coherence, etc.—and much interested in alternatives to those methods. In its refusal to “develop,” to create characters whose actions make “sense” according to ordinary protocols of logic, it might be said that the story simply subverts inherited story conventions, settling for a kind of reflexive surrealism. But the story has its own logic, its own set of compositional principles that make it something other than a mashup of existing storytelling strategies: repetition of phrases, names, and images in constantly revised contexts, the juxtaposition of such images and phrases in startling ways, often producing wildly funny effects. “Florence Green Is 81″ introduces us to a writer who wants to challenge our complacent reading habits, but whose work will also continue to be “entertaining” in its own way, even if as readers we must always allow for an aesthetics of surprise and reinvention.

Above all, perhaps, “Florence Green” introduces us to a narrative voice that will remain identifiable across Barthelme’s stories, even as it is employed to fragment narrative and convey a world often held together only by the narrator’s conviction that its various elements actually do belong together.

Dinner with Florence Green. The old babe is on a kick tonight: I want to go to some other country, she announces. Everyone wonders what this can mean. But Florence says nothing more: no explanation, no elaboration, after a satisfied look around the table bang! she is asleep again. The girl at Florence’s right is new here and does not understand. I give her an ingratiating look (a look that says, “There is nothing to worry about, I will explain everything in the privacy of my quarters Kathleen”). Lentils vegetate in the depths of the fourth principal river of the world, the Ob, in Siberia, 3200 miles. We are talking about Quemoy and Matsu. “It’s a matter of leading from strength. What is the strongest possible move on our part? To deny them the islands even though the islands are worthless in themselves.” Baskerville, a sophomore at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, which he attends with the object of becoming a famous writer, is making his excited notes. The new girl’s boobies are like my secretary’s knees, very prominent and irritating. Florence began the evening by saying, grandly, “the upstairs bathroom leaks you know.” What does Herman Kahn think about Quemoy and Matsu? I can’t remember, I can’t remember . . .

Not only does Flying to America contribute to a distortion of Barthelme’s body of work by obscuring the significance of a story like “Florence Green Is 81″; it further works to erase Barthelme’s achievement as it was embodied in his original books by gathering so many of the stories published in the earliest of those books (by my count, nine from Caligari alone). Of course, this was not per se an editorial decision on Herzinger’s part, bequeathed as she was with all of the leftovers not already included in the first two omnibus volumes. Nevertheless, the effect is the same as if such a decision had been made. Readers curious enough about the provenance of the stories in this book to scan the “Notes” section can’t help but wonder whether Caligari or Unspeakable Practices might just have been apprentice work, interesting in an archival sense but finally dispensable, when in fact each still provides a bracing reading experience over 40 years after it first appeared and contains such classic Barthelme stories as “Me and Miss Mandible,” “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” “A Shower of Gold,” “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” and “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning.” The man who wrote these stories was already in full possession of his literary powers, but future readers of Barthelme will have a much diminished appreciation of this fact if Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, and City Life are not available, or at least if some future collected edition of Barthelme’s fiction does not maintain these books’ complete contents as its organizing principle.

Flying to America does, on the other hand, collect a few of Barthelme’s stories that have never before appeared in book form (in some cases, never before published), and to that extent does currently perform a useful service to Barthelme’s readers. It allows us to read both what the editor identifies as Barthelme’s first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report,” and what may be his final story, “Pandemonium.” (Although, again the reasons for their placement in the book, as nos. 24 and 33, respectively, are not in any way clear.) If anything, “Pages” demonstrates that Barthelme’s peculiarly angled vision was fully focused when he began publishing short fiction, as it is a recognizably Barthelmean portrayal of the essential absurdity of post-World War II American life that could easily have been included in Come Back, Dr. Caligari. “Pandemonium” shares the earlier story’s setting in a white collar workplace, but unfortunately this story doesn’t really seem much of an advance beyond the kind of skewed satire at which “Pages” already shows Barthelme to be especially adept. Perhaps if “Pandemonium,” as the editor suggests, was left incomplete, Barthelme might still have made something more distinctive of it; as it is, the story testifies to a continuity in Barthelme’s career that needs to be acknowledged, although ultimately Flying to America provides little or no context or critical framework within which to profitably consider the interplay of continuity and innovation in Barthelme’s work.

The packaging of the fiction of a writer like Donald Barthelme in such an assortment as Flying to America raises important questions, not just about perceptions of Barthelme’s career as a short story writer but also perceptions of the status of short stories in general. Because Barthelme’s achievement as a writer of fiction is primarily as an author of short stories, his example is particularly resonant, but the problem of wrenching the work out of meaningful context, of isolating individual stories without reference to other work, or to the enabling assumptions the author brings to the work, is almost always present in the way our literary culture regards the short story. Stories are published in an essentially haphazard fashion, depending entirely on what a particular publication (generally disconnected from all other such publications) find “suitable” to its own editorial tastes. By and large, the publication of short stories is considered a preliminary step some writers must take to become a credentialed author, usually prior to going on to write a novel (when real recognition will occur) or as something established writers do as a kind of respite from or supplement to writing novels. Thus writers whose most representative work is in short fiction have an inherently more difficult time getting their work judged appropriately. It would seem that even as important a postwar American writer as Donald Barthelme ultimately might not be read in the way—with the right kind of attention—his fiction deserves.

In his introduction to Not-Knowing, a previous collection of Barthelme’s nonfiction (also edited by Kim Herzinger), John Barth refers to that book, as well as the “story-volume” that will become Flying to America, as a “booksworth of encores,” suggesting these volumes are simply intermediary repackagings that will in turn lead readers “back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to Come Back, Dr Caligari, to Unspeakable Practices, to Snow White and City Life, and the rest.” If the collected versions of Barthelme’s stories do indeed act merely as “end-courses” that for now keep his work in the literary public’s awareness in the years following his death, yielding eventually back to the books both Barth and I think are the core of Barthelme’s accomplishment, then the publication of Flying to America will have done little harm and arguably some good. But I fear, given the economics of American publishing, that the original books will not be readily available and that Barthelme will be known to future readers mostly through the assembled miscellanies—perhaps only by Sixty Stories. This will be a sad (and avoidable) injustice to a great writer.