Excerpt of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller
(Page 2 of 12)
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At the beginning of the 1960s, most American novelists took the greats of
previous generations--particularly Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald--as
their models. Writers pursuing more idiosyncratic paths in the manner of William
Faulkner, writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, were active and
even celebrated, but at the center stood the ideal of a big, bestselling,
realist novel of social reportage, a form whose obsolescence the young novelist
Jonathan Franzen bemoaned in an essay he wrote for Harper's magazine in 1996.
Franzen maintains that the last "challenging" novel to find a mass
audience and to "infiltrate" the national imagination was Joseph
Heller's Catch-22, published in 1961. Catch-22 is a satirical war novel about
the yawning gap between officially sanctioned reality and the experiences of its
characters, and its success indicated that American culture had begun to
entertain doubts about all authoritative pronouncements, including, perhaps, the
Great American Novel.
As the decade closed, authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Richard Brautigan, and
Ken Kesey were sharing young readers' shelf space with such icons as J.R.R.
Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, and Carlos Castaneda, whose writings were more likely
to blow the mind than define the age. Books by literary lions like John Updike,
Saul Bellow, and William Styron still made it to the number one spot on The New
York Times bestseller list, but women and blacks were already protesting the way
they had been portrayed by such writers. The audience for literary fiction had
begun to splinter, and the very notion that one novelist could speak for an
entire nation or generation seemed worse than improbable; it was outright and
inexcusable hubris. By the 1980s, the bestseller lists belonged to authors of
fat volumes of commercial fiction, books whose visceral, rather than social or
psychological, concerns could be counted on to appeal to the largest number of
readers: thrillers, sagas, horror stories, and the women's genre sometimes known
as "shopping and fucking" novels.
In the 1970s, members of various groups who had once compliantly read the
designated Big Book of the moment by authors like Mailer and his designated
"Talent in the Room," increasingly demanded fiction by and about
people like themselves. Women, in particular, defected, leading to a boomlet in
novels of middle-class female discontent, a trend that helped launch the career
of Margaret Atwood, among many other women writers. Because women continue to
buy and read more fiction than men, this development profoundly changed not only
the publishing market but the way authors see their place in the world. Franzen
wrote, "Writers like Jane Smiley and Amy Tan today seem conscious and
confident of an attentive audience. Whereas all the male novelists I know,
including myself, are clueless as to who could possibly be buying our
books."
This interest in fresh perspectives also fostered a literary blossoming among
racial and sexual minorities. Although multicultural idealism would eventually
become problematic, it provided early support for major talents--Toni Morrison
and John Edgar Wideman in the United States, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri in
England--who otherwise might never have been read, or perhaps even published. At
its best, multiculturalism expanded the horizons of the literary audience and
immeasurably enriched the variety of fiction available in the average bookstore.
Later, at its worst, it led to the glorification of second-rate writers, the
establishment of a subtle climate of bad faith, and the exasperation of
successful authors of color who chafed at multiculturalist demands that they
properly represent their races.
In the meantime, during the 1970s, a coterie of white male novelists
retreated to American universities to pursue a variety of experimental writing
sometimes called metafiction (because it was often about the nature of fiction
itself) or, more generally, postmodernism. Writers like John Barth, Robert
Coover, Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass were still enshrined
in the reading lists of college-level English classes in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, but they increasingly fell by the wayside as fiction writers and
editors outside the academy embraced realism. In a sometimes bafflingly abstract
1977 diatribe entitled On Moral Fiction, the novelist John Gardner
attacked the postmodernists for what he considered a solipsistic obsession with
form over the concerns of "true art," which "seeks to improve
life, not debase it." (This salvo, notorious for its disdainful naming of
names, further confused readers who had thought that Gardner was himself a
postmodernist.) On Moral Fiction, like the feminist and multicultural critiques
of its time, is a classic example of the American penchant for denouncing
perceived schools of writing on grounds that fuse aesthetics and ideology--in
other words, bad writing isn't just bad, it's evil. (British writers prefer
simply to attack one another's character, a tactic that makes their quarrels
much more entertaining.)
Reproduced with the
permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be
reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
