Recent American Fiction: In Search of Appropriate Modes

RecentAmericanFiction: InSearchof AppropriaJeModes PhthpD. Beidler.American Literature andthe Experience of Vietnam. Athens:Universityof Georgia Press, 1982. 220 + xivpp. R.G.Collins.ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston:G.K. Hall, 1982.292 + viiipp. TomLeClairand Larry McCaffery. Am·thing Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporm:vAmerican Novelists. Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1983.305 pp. LarryMcCaffery. The Metafictional Muse: TheWorksa/Robert Coove,; Donald Barthe/me, andWilliamH.Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.300 +xi pp. GabrielMiller.John Irving. NewYork: FrederickUngar, 1982.226 + x pp. Gerald F.Manning Critical writings about recent American fiction are full of an excited and also confused sense of diversity. Certainly the burgeoning activity of the 1970s-the great variety of fictional works produced and the provocative debates among critical theorists-has resulted in some useful (and in some cases brave) attempts to explain and summarize that activity. The books grouped together here illustrate this diversity but also show clearly some common concerns which are currently dominating the practice and study of fiction, as my discussion will indicate. All are useful and all should be made availableto those who read and study contemporary American fiction. Each succeeds well in summarizing and ordering its subject: the career of the later John Cheever (Collins); the first stage of John Irving's career (Miller); the increasingly prevalent concerns of metafiction and its practitioners (McCaffery's books); the Vietnam experience and its literature (Beidler). Of all the writers examined and interviewed in these books, John Cheever is the one who most draws us back to the decades prior to the 1970s and shows a dramatic transition in his own career. R.G. Collins' collection demonstrates clearly the development both in Cheever's fiction and in critical attitudes toward it, from the "New Yorker" realism and suburban subject matter of his early stories and novels to the condensed metaphoric statement and symbolic density of the later works. One essayist in fact sees in Cheever's later work a move into "more innovative techniques and bleaker Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 1985. 2J7-2){l 238 Gerald F.Manning vision," and describes many of the best later stories as "self-conscious reflexive,metafictional" (Slabey,p. 189).Cheever's fictions-and this collectio~ of reviews and essays-give us an unusual opportunity to examine some basic questions of tone, mode and value in prose narrative, since Cheever has been defiantly individualistic and difficult to categorize. No doubt itis Cheever's slippery refusal to be just one kind of writer, combined with the four-decade span of his career, that has led to the uncertain critical response to his work. As Collins points out in his "Introduction": "John Cheever has been praised by an astonishing number of his peers as one of the greatest writers of the century; at the same time, paradoxically, few writers have been discussed with such ill temper by an important group of reviewers and critics" (p. 1). Attempting a comprehensive survey of material on Cheever, Collins has collected a representative sampling of reviews of both short stories and novels, two interviews with Cheever, and (by far the most valuable part of the book) sixteen essays on Cheever's fiction, eight of which are new. One regrettable weakness is the provision of only a "Bibliography Supplement, 1978-1981,"so that the non-specialist (who would welcome a book like this as an introduction to the writer) will not find a simple chronological list of Cheever's novels and story collections. Otherwise Collins has served Cheever well in his selecting and editing, and his own "overview" essay offers a succinct guide to what has been done and what needs to be done in Cheever criticism. He concludes: "To date, most analyses of his themes remain cursory,most discussion of his styleisgeneral, structural and formal approaches to the individual works have been attempted in only a few cases" (p. 18). Unfortunately, many of these shortcomings are also represented in Collins' collection. In the reviews especially, one tires of the glib generalizations which mark the style of too many such writers. While a collection of reviews helps to show the variety of contemporary responses to Cheever's fiction...