The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey by Elaine B. Safer (review)

of romance of the best seller variety” (Elias, Letters of Dreiser, p. 329). In the same letter Dreiser disparaged Hamlin Garland for his latent romanticism, a point of information that would account for Riggio’s commentary that Mencken referred to Howells and Garland as the “lady critics” (p. 57). Dreiser’s letter to Mencken in 1916 also reveals that Garland, among other writers, refused to sign the protest against the suppression of The "Genius." Another important theme that Dreiser-Mencken Letters brings home is Mencken’s role through Dreiser in making modem American literature multiethnic. “More than anyone else perhaps,” Van Wyck Brooks once observed, “Mencken broke the way for writers who were descended from ‘foreign’ stocks and who were not yet sure of their place in the sun” (p. 325). Dreiser was indeed the first major American writer with a foreign name; moreover, two of the dominant streams of post-World War II fiction in America have been Jewish and black American. Norman Mailer’s and Saul Bellow’s indebtedness to Dreiser is as well known as Richard Wright’s paying homage in Black Boy to Mencken and Dreiser. “All my life,” Wright wrote, “had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modem novel, and I could not read enough of them” (Black Boy, p. 247). The American books that had the greatest impact on the young Wright were Mencken’s A Book of Prejudices and Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie, the two novels among other Dreiser novels for which Mencken had his greatest admiration and respect. Students of minority literature will be pleased to find Riggio’s reference to Dreiser’s meeting in 1944 with Wright among other young American novelists, but one regrets that more is not made of such an association. One is puzzled, for example, by Dreiser’s reticence about the photograph ofa black boy being lynched that Mencken enclosed in a letter in 1936. Although there is no way of knowing why Dreiser preferred not to comment on it in his reply, one would like to be reminded of Dreiser’s “NiggerJeff,” published in 1901, perhaps one of the most poignant short stories ever written in America. These, however, are only a handful of missing links among the hundreds of threads skillfully woven into a tapestry—a rare, remarkably coherent piece of Americana that students of American literature and culture will enjoy seeing in generations to come. Kent State University Yoshinobu Hakutani Safer, Elaine B. The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1988. 216 pp. Cloth: $29.95. Along with the self-conscious preoccupation of metafiction, the reductive tonelessness of minimalism, the transformations of magic realism, and the suspensiveness of mid-fiction, there remains one more aspect of postmodernism which, for the ambition and complexity of its narrative scope and for alliterative convenience, may be thought of as maximalism. Though largely comic in mode, as Elaine Safer’s accessible but far from simplistic study shows, these novels draw upon the patterns and strategies of the epic form—encyclopedic scope, catalogs, allusiveness, among them—only to invert them with an ironic stance that rejects all institutions and systems of knowledge. Like such comic prototypes as those of Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, or Melville, the contemporary comic epics expose the follies and vices of society. What distinguishes them, Safer argues, is their caricature of traditional motifs by calling attention to the loss of values and to a world in which mechanical energy has displaced order and direction with random movement and the prospect of annihilation. Safer contrasts the contemporary comic epic, which lacks a moral basis or specific remedy for the ills it satirizes, with two American models to which it serves as an ironic counterpart: Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The highly allusive religiosity of the one, with its acknowledgment of the legendary past, and the embrasive celebra­ tion of innocence in the other, serve to establish a polarity between which the devices of chronicle, saints’ lives, and jeremiad sermon, as well as the themes of America as a new Eden and culmination of Western...