Excerpt of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller
(Page 5 of 12)
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The question of how contemporary fiction should deal with mass culture was
explicitly taken up by an heir to the encyclopedic tradition, the young novelist
David Foster Wallace, in "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S.
Fiction," as essay published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.
Wallace describes a new generation of "Image-Fiction" writers so
acclimated to the mass media that they "use the transient received myths of
popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about Ôreal,' albeit
pop-mediated characters." (Mark Leyner, one of these writers, produces
fiction that incorporates influences ranging from ad copy to scientific
treatises, in what Wallace describes as "witty, erudite, extremely
high-quality prose television.") Wallace then questions the "irony and
ridicule" deployed by these writers because, he claims, television is
already ironic about itself, and thus the medium has deftly co-opted its
would-be satirists. "Television . . . has become able to capture and
neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease
and cynicism that television requires," Wallace maintains. He ends by
calling for sincerity and for novelists who "treat of plain old untrendy
human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."
Most (if not quite all) of the authors covered in this book consider
themselves to be aiming for something like that, whether they deal with life in
the United States or in Nigeria, whether they write complicated, brainy epics or
quiet domestic dramas, whether they take as their subjects urgent political
situations or eternal metaphysical quandaries. It's conventional to bemoan the
fact that the novelists of 2000 mean less to their society than the novelists of
1960 meant to theirs, but the literary landscape I explored in the process of
editing this book also seems much richer and more varied than the one obtained
forty years ago. Readers themselves--from Oprah Winfrey to the organizers of the
private reading groups that have proliferated across the nation to the
participants in Internet discussion groups like Salon.com's Table Talk
community--are increasingly determining which are the "important"
books from a staggering array of new titles published each year, based on
criteria that often defy the literary establishment's. These are tough times for
publishers and perhaps for authors as well, but for readers an abundance of
voices and stories await at local (and virtual) bookstores. The red-hot center
may be impossible to find, but we have the whole world instead. Reprinted from
Salon.com edited by Laura Miller by permission of Viking Books, a member of
Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 Laura Miller. All rights reserved. This
excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission.
EXCERPTS
Abbey, Edward 1927-1989 b. Home, Pennsylvania
FICTION: Jonathan Troy (1956), The
Brave Cowboy (1956), Fire on the Mountain (1962), Black Sun (1971), The Monkey
Wrench Gang (1975), Good News (1980), The Fool's Progress (1988), Hayduke
Lives! (1990)
NONFICTION: Desert Solitaire: A Season
in the Wilderness (1968), Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains
(1970), Slickrock: The Canyon Country of Southeast Utah (with Philip Hyde,
1971), Cactus Country (1973), The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the
American West (1977), Back Roads of Arizona (1978), The Hidden Canyon: A River
Journey (1977), Desert Images: An American Landscape (1979), Abbey's Road:
Take the Other (1979), Down the River (1982), In Praise of Mountain Lions
(with John Nichols, 1984), Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984),
The Best of Edward Abbey (1988), One Life at a Time, Please (1988), A Voice
Crying in the Wilderness: Essays from a Secret Journal (1990), Confessions of
a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989 (1994),
The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (1995)
Reproduced with the
permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be
reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
