Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

Reaching into its fifth decade, this chapter addressing developments in "contemporary" fiction now covers events of an adult lifetime. Writers whose fame and importance began in the 1960s have either died or are producing retrospective, self-critical works. Professors who taught them in the 1970s now find their classes scheduled in freshly built buildings named after people they remember as colleagues. Are the 1960s indeed the last great historical and cultural marker for the past half century? Studies published in 2003 treat the work of subsequent decades in detail, but almost always with reference to the self-styled Age of Aquarius. How the new geopolitical realities of the post-2001 world will influence fiction and its criticism remains to be seen.

i Overview

As literary studies become an increasingly rare item even in university press catalogues, readers will have to form their own syntheses to better grasp the period at hand. Thankfully, summary views by or about significant figures from this era are now appearing, making such judgment possible. Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, Clarence Major, and John Gardner all emerged as writers in the 1960s, flourished in the 1970s, took new directions in the 1980s, and have served as indices for appraising the work of others. Each book is unique: Abish writes a memoir about issues in his fiction, Barthelme's second wife (of four) presents a historical account of her years with him (a period comprising his first success as a fictionist), Major composes a study of his mother's life (including the bifurcated roots of his own childhood and influences), while only Gardner is the subject of a full-fledged biography. Yet together these studies zero in on the contemporary fictive experience from four corners of special interest.

In Abish's Double Vision (Knopf), Abish the critic examines his work as a fictionist by alternating chapters titled "The Writer-to-Be" with sections called "The Writer." An American citizen since 1957, he distinguished himself with work characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, some of it (such as Alphabetical Africa) the most metafictively self-referential of the period. In 1980 Abish redirected his fascination with the phenomenological surface of language to an ostensibly realistic subject: postwar, postmodern Germany. The irony was that the author, an émigré (at age seven) from Vienna, had never visited Germany; hence his novel was as much of an imaginative construct as his most extreme literary experiments of the previous decade. How German Is It? thus asked a question referring as much to its composition as to its ostensible subject matter. Double Vision parallels the author's experiences in the world with his experiences in writing. Although there are a few references to Proust, the memoirist here is not searching to recover lost time. As an American novelist deeply conscious of his own background, he has never lost it. Indeed, the literary culture would never allow that. Instead, this new work demonstrates how experience and writing are all of one piece, given the way events of the 20th century propelled the author from Hitler's Reich to Chiang's China, and from there to the just-founded state of Israel and eventually to New York. Throughout this fiction and his criticism, Abish explores the nature of what he calls "the familiar." How much of it, he asks, derives comfort from either unstated assumptions or deliberate effacements? Abish's fiction, like the novels and short stories of so many of his contemporaries, not only distrusts the understanding necessary for sound communication but employs that distrust to shape his narrative. Imagine the complexities of experience when a Jewish American novelist, exiled from one of Hitler's annexed countries as a child, visits Germany for the first time as an adult who has written a metafictive novel about the place. What results is the title's "double vision," a critical perspective that puts ethics and aesthetics into a new relationship appropriate to postmodern times.

Another chapter of literary history is written by Helen Moore Barthelme in Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound (Texas A&M). The man was an acknowledged giant...