Novelist to Pundit

BOOK REVI EWS Novelist to Pundit Jeffrey J. Williams The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work Curtis White PoliPointPress http://www.p3books.com 184 pages; cloth, $24.00 The Fiction Collective is now a legendary venture in literary publishing. It was founded in the early 1 970s by a group of younger novelists, including Jonathan Baumbach (fictionalized in his son's film The Squid and the Whale [2005]), Steve Katz, Peter Spielberg, and Ronald Sukenick, looking for an alternative to mainstream publishing, which was just beginning to morph to its current short-term, high-profit, blockbuster model. One of the aims of the Collective was that its books stay in print. In its first decade, it published over thirty novels by a range of writers, then little known and tending toward experimental forms, like Russell Banks, Raymond Federman, Mark Leyner, and Gerald Vizenor. Those in the Collective—you became a member if you published in it, and you were then obligated to read manuscripts—practiced DIY (Do It Yourself) long before Ani DiFranco. Curtis White has been a central player in Fiction Collective. He published his first book, Heretical Songs (1981), with it, and he led the second generation of the press, rechristened in 1989 as Fiction Collective Two, which he directed (with Sukenick) until 1999 and helped produce from Illinois State University, where he teaches. In his time, FC2 published Ricardo Cortez Cruz's Straight Outta Compton (1992) and Richard Grossman's Alphabet Man (1993), and founded a new series called Black Ice Books with titles by Mark Amerika and Samuel Delany. (Sukenick and White's In the Slipstream: An FC2 Reader [1999] gives a good account and sampling of the press's history.) Literary histories usually recount a string of landmark books, but this kind of work, editing and publishing, like delivering the food to restaurants, is often invisible. White has done a good share of this kind of work to ensure that literary fiction continues. White has also contributed his string of fiction. After Heretical Songs, he published Metaphysics in the Midwest (1989), The Illuminated History ofthe Future (1989), The Idea ofHome (1993), AnarchoHindu (1995), Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998), Requiem (2001), and America's Magic Mountain (2004), the latter three with Dalkey Archive Press, itselfanother success story ofalternative publishing in market-mad times. Dalkey's lengthy list tends toward out-of-print minor classics by modernists like the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky and Aldous Huxley and reprints by postmodernists like Stanley Elkin and Gilbert Sorrentino, although it also publishes new fiction by writers like David Markson and White. White's fiction follows the general line of 60s fabulist fiction (Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, William H. Gass, Sukenick, etc.)—often over the top, whereby characters like Daffy Duck or Richard Nixon might appear, experimental in form, juxtaposing fragments or discontinuous scenes, and in an associative style that spins out a riff rather than concentrates an effect as a high modemist might. White, for instance, in Memories ofMy Father (Why do postmodernists from Barthelme's The Dead Father [1975] on have an obsession with dads?), has a section playing off the Cartwright family from the old TV show Bonanza ( 1 959-1 973), spliced together with, among other scenes, a set of propositions on the show Combat (1962-1967). Such fiction is usually called postmodernist because it combines low and high culture and interjects pop characters, but I think it fits in a longer surrealist tradition, that sets the normal world askew. (Mark Leyner, whose fictive world is halfway like ours but profoundly and strikingly weird, is one endpoint of the surrealist line.) White's new book is three-quarters a rant and one-fourth useful reportage. Though both set themselves apart from the soothingly familiar realism of mainstream fiction, postmodernist fiction takes the opposite tack from the compressed verbiage and gritty realism of minimalism (think Raymond Carver, probably the most influential American writer of the 80s). Postmodemist fiction frequently shows the puppet strings, sometimes in exuberant play—and its playfulness seems connected to a sensibility we call the 60s—and sometimes in...