The New American Novel of Manners: The Fiction of Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane by Jerome Klinkowitz (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 study would be as perfect as any study can be. As we have it, it is first rate here and less so there, but it is definitely a major study, unique in its intensity to grasp and shape the Cather canon. Brigham Young UniversityJohn J. Murphy Klinkowitz, Jerome. The New American Novel ofManners: The Fiction of Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986. 176 pp. Cloth: $19.00. For those who thought that the novel of manners was as dead as the novel itself has been purported to be, Jerome Klinkowitz's The New American Novel of Manners is likely to be very surprising indeed. True, many know the study by James Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America (1972), but Tuttleton's study obviously cannot embrace the last fifteen years and, in fact, when focusing on post-World War II novelists, discusses only those who trace their lineage to James and Howells and Wharton, realists such as Auchincloss, Cozzens, Marquand, and O'Hara. But since the 1960s there has hardly been a notion that the novel of manners had survived or could ever survive amidst what various critics have called "metafiction" (Gass, McCaffery, Scholes, et al.), "surfiction" (Federman), and "the non-fiction novel" (Zavarzadeh, Hollowell) among other oxymoronic or otherwise antinovelistic terms such as "anti-fiction" (Stevick), "super-fiction" (Bellamy), and "disruptive fiction" (Klinkowitz himself). Not the least of the ironies involved in Klinkowitz's new book is the fact that he himself has been among the most prolific of authors touting the non- or anti-realistic trends in the fiction of the last twenty years, a perspective visible in his recent The Self-Apparent Word (1984), Literary Subversions (1985), and the earlier Literary Disruptions (1975; 2nd ed. 1980), a book that directed the course of much of the criticism of fiction in the last decade or so. Is Klinkowitz thus a traitor to his own cause or has he merely seen the truth lying behind even the most experimental of fictions, namely, that novels-as-rtOi/e/s are always grounded on our social being? Klinkowitz would claim for his new book that neither is the case. He adapts his standard premise here to argue that there is something new or essentially post-modernist even in the novel of manners when it is written by Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, or Thomas McGuane. There is, for instance, a new attitude toward manners in these exemplary writers. In the old novel of manners, the novelist apparently believed in the modes of behavior he or she valorized. Klinkowitz's three "manneristic" (his epithet) writers do not manifest that sort of naive realism. Instead, they "have adopted the aesthetic that informs the literary theory of our age, by which social practices are treated as if they are signs in a linguistic system" (p. 7). In the old novel of manners, the author assumed (Klinkowitz implies) that the codes of dress, behavior, language, and the like that set the standard of values for the author were also codes plugged into a system of meaning reified into an ideal form and given status as a kind of essence. The new novel of manners, however, merely attributes to codes of any sort the status of signs, and as signs they are forced into the play of signification as it exists within the domains of structure exemplified in language, within, that is, the tensions, as defined by post-Saussurean linguistics, of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, the capability of substitutions and syntax that characterize any sign-system such as language. This premise means that manners, for the new manneristic novelists, are merely self-referential, and are not at all "out there," independent of human choice, invio- 250Reviews late in some ideal space. As Klinkowitz claims, "The novel of manners now becomes the novel of manners, with both writerly and readerly self-consciousness for the forms involved " (p. 8). Although Klinkowitz seldom makes (and does not need to make) good on his claim regarding the se/^-consciousness of his three exemplary authors, he does indeed focus on the ways in which the three treat manners in their...