The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner (review)

Sally Bachner argues in The Prestige of Violence that, for the past half century, “unspeakable” phenomena—“genocide, terrorism, war, torture, rape”—have been spoken about, incessantly, in the “most celebrated American novels” (2). She credits “elite tastemakers” for sustaining the cultural “prestige” of literary violence and accounts for this durable, elite “coterie consensus” (27) by examining several of these narratives and their critical receptions: Morrison’s Beloved; Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Mailer’s The Armies of the Night; Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49; Atwood’s Surfacing and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as a pair; and seven novels by Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. Always theoretically scrupulous, Bachner makes a point of explaining the absence from her book of novelists whose work might seem at first glance to belong in this conversation.

To my surprise Bachner neither discusses nor explains overlooking Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, arguably the most ambitious American post-millennium historical trauma novel—part of a “a one-man cultural revolution” (Adams)—while sedulously explaining her exclusion of work by Cormac McCarthy, Brett Easton Ellis, and Joan Didion. Bachner treats Didion as a kindred inquirer, a flouter of the “coterie consensus” under discussion: For Didion, what’s unspeakable is what we choose not to say rather than what we supposedly can’t say (5–8).

Despite singling out such a decidedly non-academic critic as a role model, Bachner positions herself within an ongoing academic conversation (15) and as an heir to the erudite academic theorizing of the past few decades—the same era that produced the writing her book examines. More bracingly, she flags the way so-called imaginative writers tend to anticipate insights that eventually become academic commonplaces (Bloom 27): Mailer’s discovery of postmodernism a generation ahead of Fredric Jameson, for example (Bachner 76). This appeal to “Theory” (3–4, 13–15) undergirds what makes Bachner’s book most provocative: its challenge to the “tribute” our most acclaimed novelists and their “elite readers” pay one another for confronting, albeit vicariously, the “unspeakable violence” of the works she discusses here (2–5). This self-regarding “tribute” for facing head-on the “authenticity” literary violence certifies—an authenticity that “conventional language” represses and our merely sociable fellow citizens shy away from—Bachner describes as “therapeutic and illusory” (3, 5). Bachner denies writing a “brief” against this now dominant consensus (33); however, the complications Bachner identifies seem intent on denying sophisticated readers the rewards that enabling novelists promise: access to authenticity and “ultimate reality” (3, 81).

Even more impressive than Bachner’s conscientious theorizing (which intermittently overburdens her prose) are her surprising and illuminating topical historical discoveries, such as the role of the New York Times as a key intertext in Pale Fire and the importance of psychiatry’s revised 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a discursive companion to Atwood’s and Piercy’s novels (88). Bachner’s reading of The Crying of Lot 49 as “a story about the failure of liberalism” (71) and a move to sell the prestige of violence to sheltered—prosperous, affluent—readers builds on her analysis of Pynchon’s critique of the Vietnam-era military-industrial technocracy (36–38, 61, 66). The analysis includes a clever account of Pynchon’s use of political, clinical, and mathematical abbreviations (which Bachner unfortunately mislabels “acronyms”) (62–63, 70).

As a contribution to Roth studies, Bachner’s contrasting of The Ghostwriter with Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America to demonstrate Roth’s turn from materialism to dematerializing violence (109–112) offers an original and nuanced approach to Roth’s career and preoccupations. But Bachner’s emphasis on Roth as a Shoah writer overlooks Roth’s attention to various wars at home in the American Trilogy novels and undermines her book’s overall argument. Bachner’s repeated attention to Vietnam and to the traumatized and traumatizing, “scarred and morally compromised...