Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

In 1955, when Robert E. Spiller’s The Cycle of American Literature argued for the figural and historical typologies that help organize American Literary Scholarship and most other surveys, the period covered by this chapter had not even begun. Now, 58 years later, its parameters equal that of other eras. But does any reliable typification fit this latest epoch in the cavalcade of American letters? Has postmodernism arisen only to quickly fall? Has deconstruction undermined the critic’s ability to totalize? Perhaps these very instabilities are the most apt characterization of literary activity during the past six decades. At the very least, a spirit of debate has characterized the best scholarship of fiction written throughout these years.

i General Studies

No sooner did writers such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Mark Danielewski, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Safran Foer disavow the tenets of postmodernism that had held fast during their student days than Mary K. Holland began arguing that their work “remains postmodern in its assumptions about the arbitrariness of language, and yet still uses this postmodernism and poststructuralism to humanist ends of generating empathy, communal bonds, ethical and political questions, and, most basically, communicable meaning.” Her Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury) sees postmodernism as not repudiated but rather redirected so that its strategies and techniques can serve a renewed purpose. As a transitional figure from what may be called high postmodernism to the work of these younger writers, Don DeLillo strives for a humanist sensibility that allows for a skepticism about language without dismissing its communicative power. Cormac McCarthy joins this group with his novel The Road, which manages “a harmonious multiplicity in narrative voice and emphatic use of form in the service of content,” qualities evident as well in Wallace’s story “Octet” and in Foer’s novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Irony alone “debunks” without constructing anything in the place of what it destroys, Wallace has objected, and Holland’s study shows how language can rebuild a sense of hope from the fragments that survive postmodernism’s deconstruction.

Holland notes how the first evidence for such hope in Wallace’s earliest work tends to be self-consciously “shaky,” and in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge) Peter Boxall identifies a body of fiction that “opens up the present” along the lines of fragility among relationships. Although most of his examples are from the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth, four Americans figure prominently in Boxall’s treatment. DeLillo’s work tracks a historical passage toward a looming apocalypse, while Philip Roth’s later novels betray an exhaustion of narrative voice brought on by themes and subjects the author’s earlier manner cannot ably handle. McCarthy looks past environmental disaster to see the dissolution of language as both a cause and an effect. It is in Eggers’s writing that Boxall finds a vivid fictional imagination that draws power from the failure of historical components to cohere. The opposite of fragility in fictive vision is explored by John McNally in Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction (Iowa), in which John Gardner’s prescriptions for writing “moral fiction” (see AmLS 1977, p. 337) enable a style that puts language firmly in control. Examples are drawn from the works of Tim O’Brien (foreshadowing), Toni Morrison and Raymond Carver (density versus spareness in prose), Elmore Leonard (accessibility), and John Updike (whose sentences approximate the structures and effect of music). A helpful critical survey that takes a more inclusive view is presented by Christian Moraru in “Thirteen Ways of Passing Postmodernism” (AmBR 34, iv: 3–4). Referencing the perspective employed in his own Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (see AmLS 2011, p. 332), Moraru acknowledges a general sense of “passing” but wonders whether it “equals a neatly demarcated exit and thus the end of an era.” Acknowledging that “postmodernism has always been an ontological oddball” being “out of sync with itself” because of its posture of belatedness (following an elapsed modernism), Moraru characterizes its present state as less...