Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

If ever a period and genre were sufficiently complex for the full expression of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in literary history, it would be the four and one-half decades covered by this chapter. The finely nuanced realism so common to 1960, being written then and now by John Updike, presents the thesis against which antirealistic, or at least nonmimetic, fiction produced by such authors as Robert Coover and Raymond Federman reacts. In their wake has come other work, much of it cognizant of the split over representation. But have scholars made their own contributions toward finding a synthesis that constitutes a new whole? In both general and particular studies this year some uncommonly gifted critics do.

i General Studies

Simply to write a book in which works by writers so diverse as Russell Banks, Cormac McCarthy, Lewis Nordan, Dorothy Allison, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Sherman Alexie, Robert Stone, and Bret Easton Ellis figure equally in making the critic’s point would be no small achievement. But to do as James R. Giles has done in The Spaces of Violence (Alabama) is to suggest the making of a synthesis this period in literature deserves. In his earlier study, Violence in the Contemporary American Novel (see AmLS 2000, p. 334), Giles covered an equally diverse set of writers, albeit focused in their fictive uses of violence in urban settings. His new book displays both geographical and demographic range, from small-town New England (Banks’s Affliction) and Appalachia (McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God ) to Mississippi (Nordan’s Wolf Whistle) and tribal reservations and the towns near them (Alexie’s Indian Killer). Settings can be more than regional, such as the locus of a football field (DeLillo’s End Zone) or “the interpenetrating American and Vietnamese spaces” (Stone’s Dog Soldiers). Violence itself will take a cross-country route (as on the Greyhound bus lines of Denis Johnson’s Angels) through the space of the economically disadvantaged, or center itself on the abusive treatment of women (Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina). Along the way, violence acts as a force of the irrational (McCarthy), as a narcotic (Banks), or—in DeLillo’s case—as “the inevitable failure of a desperate mingling of language and violent games to support the masculine identities of his characters.” Through his two important studies Giles has taken advantage of a saying the truth of which he observed as a youngster in Texas and as a student witnessing the library tower shootings at his university: that “violence is as American as apple pie.” From this sad truth that he himself understands so well Giles ranges widely before coming back to the more predictable urban terrors of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Yet even here Giles explores new ground, delimiting the “new dimensions of urban space” where violence lurks beneath a surface of commodities and brand names.

The novel form itself is worried by a violence of sorts done to it by broadcast media, according to Kathleen Fitzpatrick. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt) describes “a common thread of anxiety that runs through the histories of the new communications media that have arisen since the mid-nineteenth century.” These anxieties, which include dehumanization, the illusion of technological improvement, and the loss of individuality, affect the novel in a special way, thanks to postmodernism’s understanding that reality is created by its own discourse. Three current writers—like those chosen by Giles, novelists not customarily grouped together—share a commonality in reacting to these pressures from television in particular. The first two, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, have been previously linked on the basis of their “obsession with the macro level systems of technology and economics,” especially when those systems exert power over the individual, but Fitzpatrick prefers to distinguish their approaches. Pynchon “pulls back the cloak” from more common attempts to clothe such systems in the trappings of the human. DeLillo keeps the cloak in place so that friction between the writer and his or her culture can be exploited rather than reduced...