Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

"Literary eras" are matters for debate and contention, as the editors of Critique say in their special issue (51, ii) that notes the passing of a literary generation. All the more arguable are the micro-eras that divide 20th- and now 21st-century fiction. But Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery have it right when they line up the numbers: that it has been over 40 years since American culture suffered a loss equivalent to the recent passing of so many important writers. Some, like Norman Mailer and William Styron, were old; others, including Kathy Acker and David Foster Wallace, were sadly too young. Kurt Vonnegut was an innovator, John Updike a traditionalist, but both were well known among scholars and popular readers alike. Others, such as Gilbert Sorrentino and Ronald Sukenick, had their coteries of advocates and enthusiasts. Yet the closings of all their canons open up larger fields of interest, as a growing shelf of memoirs, biographies, and collected letters attests. With the history of an era beginning to be established, longer views of the living are taken as well.

i General Studies

Reassuringly for the structure of American Literary Scholarship, 1960 still holds as the far limit for "contemporary" fiction, a designation that in some cases corresponds to "postmodern." Although two of her principal subjects are still alive and writing, their canons are close to being established, and so Catherine Morley has little trouble being conclusive in The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (Routledge). Morley focuses on these writers' prose epics. She reads Updike's four Rabbit novels in terms of their mythic sense of national consciousness, grounded in the author's professed belief that his ideal reader would be a student of senior high school or early college age discovering his work in a public library somewhere in small town Kansas. Roth's Zuckerman trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain) and DeLillo's Underworld also present and then question this sense of national identity, inaugurating an era of democratic reflection that moves beyond the "staged simplicity" more characteristic of novels written in the 1950s. DeLillo's work helps Amy Hungerford support her thesis in Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton) that "belief in meaninglessness confers religious authority upon the literary" and thereby "becomes important to the practice of religion in America." She sees DeLillo moving beyond the postmodern agnosticism of White Noise toward a mystic sense of the afterlife expressed in Catholic terms. "Immanent transcendence" is the way religious structures translate into literary ones, a feature of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. DeLillo exploits a tension in language that opposes religious feeling with the Church's teaching, according a primacy to prayer and an appreciation of vision, mystery, and rapture. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian qualifies as a novel that mimics divine creation, "aspiring to the authoritative status of scripture," just as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye substitutes a supernatural sense of reading for "common literacy." Most interesting is Marilynne Robinson's ability in her three novels to "shape experience through creedal reflection." Together, Morley's and Hungerford's books describe an ethos that motivates contemporary American fiction writers to find new ways of expressing what their culture still holds to be truths.

Nevertheless, critics remain aware of the need to reshape their appraisals. Stuart A. Scheingold does so for key works by Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth. His The Political Novel: Re-imagining the Twentieth Century (Continuum) draws on Franz Kafka's The Trial as the progenitor for all "novels of political estrangement," a subject that interests him as a professor of political science and an expert on law and the courts. Within a larger context of British novels and books about the Holocaust, Scheingold studies three American postwar novels that draw on "late-modern social theory," an approach by which conventionally modern achievements in science, rationality, and knowledge are seen to "produce the seeds of their own discontent." Consider Slaughterhouse-Five, in which Vonnegut looks beyond the...