The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism 9781138746626, 9781138746657, 9781315180434

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM

The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar, Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding, and appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day. Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature emerita, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. A former Guggenheim fellow, a senior NEH fellow, and a Rockefeller Institute fellow, she received the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature in 2012. Among her recent books are John Steinbeck, A Literary Life; Maya Angelou, Adventurous Spirit, and Hemingway’s Wars:The Public and Private Battles.

Routledge Introductions to American Literature Series Editors: D. Quentin Miller and Wendy Martin

Routledge Introductions to American Literature provide critical introductions to the most important topics in American Literature, outlining the key literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Providing students with an analysis of the most up-to-date trends and debates in the area, they also highlight exciting new directions within the field and open the way for further study. Volumes examine the ways in which both canonical and lesser known writers from diverse class and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, and giving attention to a range of voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. These comprehensive volumes offer readable, cohesive narratives of the development of American Literature and provide ideal introductions for students. Available in this series: The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature D. Quentin Miller The Routledge Introduction to American Modernism Linda Wagner-Martin The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers Wendy Martin, Sharone Williams The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature Jennifer Haytock The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism Linda Wagner-Martin

THE ROUTLEDGE INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM

Linda Wagner-Martin

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Linda Wagner-Martin The right of Linda Wagner-Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-74662-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-74665-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18043-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For William and Evan Duff

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsviii 1 The Origins of the American Postmodern—Barth, Gass, Barthelme

1

2 The Books That Shaped Directions—Coover, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace

18

3 Other Dominant Authors

41

4 Postmodernism in Generations

59

5 Morrison, Doctorow, Kingston, and Chabon

81

6 The Fusion of Genres in Modernism and Postmodernism

104

7 “9/11” as Insistent Game-Changer

119

8 Postmodern Writers in the Twenty-First Century

135

Selected Bibliography 147 Index162

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study begins at the conclusion of my 2016 book, The Routledge Introduction to American Modernism. Planned to continue on from that wide-ranging survey, which included lengthy chapters on not only modernism in all its genres but also the decade of the 1930s, African-American literature, and, more briefly, American literature during and after World War II, The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism is designed to be a shorter book. Part of the reasoning for this decision is the varying, sometimes contradictory, definitions of the term postmodern. Another is the fact that a variety of critical studies of postmodernism exist and are still available. In fact, the bibliography that is located at the end of this book is even larger than the corresponding bibliography for the 2016 book. There is also the globalization of both literature and criticism: whereas it was possible to make distinctions about countries of origin in considerations of the modern, such distinctions become more difficult concerning postmodernism. Many writers who are now considered “American” are from countries outside the United States; many publishers share the same tangled lineage. Of most importance is the fact that the themes and topics of postmodern texts are often, themselves, globalized. I am once again appreciative of the editorial staff of Routledge (Taylor & Francis) Press, especially of series editors Wendy Martin and Quentin Miller. I am also appreciative of the outside readers, as well as the assistance provided by the librarians of Davis and Wilson Libraries, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

1 THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN POSTMODERN—BARTH, GASS, BARTHELME

American modernism changed the literary world, eventually on a global basis. The writing of such American modernists as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.D., and countless others made readers the world over attend to what American poets, playwrights, and novelists were creating.The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature could not keep up with this prominence,1 but the fact that, especially in fiction, American books were translated into thirty to forty languages became the true marker. The world was reading writing by Americans. The world, however, cared less for what came to be known as the postmodern. If modernism in the United States ended with World War II, and there are those critics who make such a claim, it took at least twenty years more for the term postmodern to come into play with any meaningful linguistic agreement among the word’s users. Differences existed not only in language. American modernism was seen to be, largely, a movement of epistemological purity—a world view rooted in language and style choices, usually marked by a clearly stated intention. Postmodernism, however, came to incorporate wider-ranging cultural concerns. Language here was often harnessed to impact empirical meaning in ways seldom attained by modernist writers. What had been a purely literary innovation within the modern grew into some less-than-predictable political narratives. Postmodernist writers were likely to be taking sides—and in the postwar world, sides proliferated. Like the modernist principles so clearly expressed by Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, an early use of the term postmodernism occurred in Randall Jarrell’s review of Robert Lowell’s collection Lord Weary’s Castle, as well as in Charles Olson’s essays on poetics. Even though more than thirty-five years separated the establishment of these stylistic principles—whether modernist or

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postmodernist—readers fixed their attention on the ways poems employed esthetic principles (Cornis-Pope Benet 874). This early use of the term postmodern fed into formal literary criticism (of all genres of writing) by such important postwar critics as Lionel Trilling, William Van O’Connor, Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, and William H. Gass. The repetition of the term postmodern in such critical circles as Partisan Review, Harper’s,The Nation, Atlantic Monthly,The New Yorker, and the newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D. C., brought readers throughout the country into a remarkably sophisticated critical alignment. Susan Sontag’s rapid rise to the standing of public intellectual is one example of a swift-moving (and largely epistemological) cultural critique. In the words of her recent biographer Carl Rollyson, Sontag embodied the contradictions of her time—at once a serious and sometimes abstruse thinker and yet a highly quotable writer whose words made good newspaper copy. . . . The titles of her first books, such as Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will, were provocative and prescriptive. . . . In the economy of publishing, Sontag was the total package—essayist, novelist, playwright. (Rollyson Sontag 2) The same kind of impact could be ascribed to the writings of William Gass, who focused the use of the term postmodern more exclusively to fiction. Like Sontag in his philosophical expertise and his fluid yet dense style, Gass claimed an intellectual following that belied his Midwestern origins. A Navy veteran, he finished his interrupted undergraduate degree at Kenyon College and—after completing graduate work in philosophy at Cornell—taught briefly at the College of Wooster in Ohio. At the time of his first published essays and his first novel, Omenstetter’s Luck,2 Gass taught at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Years later he moved to Washington University in St. Louis. The circulation of his philosophical writing, as well as his fiction, occurred because of its unusual and insistent quality. By 1970, the time of his mixed-form novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, printed on differently colored and differently textured paper, including photographs and art pieces, Gass was as “camp,” to use Sontag’s term, as William Burroughs had seemed a decade earlier, when that novelist’s Naked Lunch appeared. Of more significance in 1970 to the cohesive study of postmodernism, however, was Gass’s first book of philosophical essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life.3 A few years later, in 1976, Gass’s next book, On Being Blue (Meditations) received high acclaim. It was well-named; the entire text was about the quality of blue-ness. More philosophical essays followed, including his 1985 Habitations of the Word: Essays and, in 1996, Finding a Form. As the philosophical underpinning for the cascade of experimental writing that would dominate much of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Gass’s books of thinking about writing were consistently valuable. In 1995 Gass published, again with Knopf, his long-awaited novel that would become a classic of the postmodern. The Tunnel illustrated words used insistently,

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cohesively, with little regard for narrative movement.4 As a large and somewhat unwieldy fiction, The Tunnel would take its place beside the other acknowledged tomes of postmodernism, Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Coover’s The Public Burning, and, later, among others, DeLillo’s Underworld,Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In the writings of Susan Sontag and William Gass, any emphasis on American esthetics and literature was likely foregrounded in European, English, and South American worlds. Ideas of philosophy as well as poetry and fiction stem as often from Sterne as Melville, and may track in a chronological sense as often from Henry James as from James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jorge Luis Borges. There was, however, no easy or immediate transfer of the term postmodern from its early uses to mainstream literary commentary. Even though John Barth would publish both The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in the late fifties, reviewers did not use the term postmodern: they were much more often inclined to trace whatever influence they saw within Barth’s fiction to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The relative ease with which twenty-first century critics apply the term postmodern to some kinds of American fiction since the middle of the twentieth century and beyond is a comparatively new development.The word is still vexed as to appropriate dates and text characteristics, as well as genres and movements. For example, the appearance during the 1950s of “Beat” poetry and fiction is seldom absorbed into postmodernism, even for a writer like Gilbert Sorrentino, whose novel Mulligan Stew5 was often paired with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Neither is the large body of poetry known as “confessional” writing. The comedy of the now famed World War II novels—Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—is often separated from the ironic malaise that could still be linked to modernism. That comedy created a political category known as “black humor” (which later, more appropriately, became known as “gallows humor”). The wry and inventive fiction and poetry produced by members of New York’s Black Arts group—chiefly by Clarence Major and Ishmael Reed, who paid his homage to the earlier African-American novelist Charles Wright—whose novel The Wig Knopf published in 1966—was also left alone in its African-American ghetto. Similarly, all the comic and inventive poetry and fiction written by so-called “feminist writers” such as Erica Jong, Marge Piercy, Judy Grahn, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker, and Marilyn French was equally segregated into gender camps. Yet each of these groups could easily have been labeled postmodern in one aspect or another. Generally speaking, postmodernism had two consistent qualities: “the first emphasized existential spontaneity, process art, and ontological pluralization.” The second direction was marked by “narrative disruption and a radical epistemology based on indeterminacy, multiperspectivism and a ‘new immanence of language,’ ” to use Ihab Hassan’s words. Given more immediate descriptors, Cornis-Pope stresses that he came to see two varieties of postmodernism: the first one—complacent, hedonistic, playfully antireferential—deserves the criticism that it has alienated fiction from

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“significant external reality.” . . .The second variety, more radically innovative and “resistant,” has contributed significantly to a critique of the basic mechanisms of storytelling. (Cornis-Pope 874) Much of this study will treat literary works that have come to be considered postmodern. In twentieth-century America, during the years John Barth and William Gass, William Gaddis and Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Kathy Acker, and Robert Coover were publishing their early writing, critics and writers were in clear disagreement about what was, or was not, postmodern. A decade after his first novel, John Barth commented about what he called “the death of the novel,” even as critic Richard Kostelanetz repeatedly questioned the meaning of “post”: “the assumption that modernism has died, to be replaced with something else.”6 The body of criticism concerning American postmodernism is not just one long lament, however. Part of the problem with this national separation, in trying to focus on postmodernism as it existed in relation to American arts and writing, was that literature and its study was becoming more and more global; delivery methods were expanding so that print or hard copy was something of a rarity rather than the primary delivery method. For example, when Brian McHale published his most recent book about the postmodern, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015), he specifically set his discussion within global perspectives. Here McHale is targeting the mid-1960s, a time when American postmodernism was dominant. McHale opens with a paragraph describing the importance of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, then moving to Canadian writer-musician Leonard Cohen, to visual artist/ painter Andy Warhol, and then to British writer J. G. Ballard, emphasizing his science fiction (and such films as Crash in 1973). One of McHale’s points is that esthetics during the 1960s, regardless of field, was an international statement. In McHale’s words, “On or about the year 1966, something changed in culture; something ended, and something else began.” McHale’s chronology is marked by career changes, impasses and renunciations, interruptions and breakdowns, crashes literal and figurative, endings and beginnings: these are the hallmarks of the year 1966 at the cutting edge of culture. Nowhere is this pattern of interruption and breakdown more conspicuous than at the conclusion of what many regard as the signature novel of 1966, The Crying of Lot 49. . . . Pynchon’s heroine, a suburban housewife named Oedipa Mass, has inadvertently uncovered what she suspects might be a centuries-long international conspiracy to subvert the postal service—unless it is a hoax, or pure paranoia on her part. Proof, one way or another, will be forthcoming at a stamp auction where agents of the conspirators—if they exist—will bid for a “lot” of counterfeit stamps. (McHale Cambridge 24–25)

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Other critics agree with McHale—postmodernism was a movement that was truly global; it crossed geographical lines; it crossed the linguistic lines between avant-garde and post-many things. It has grown today to occupy as many library shelves worldwide as the critical work about modernism.Yet at its heart rested the American novels that seemed to mark its parameters, beginning with either Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which came after his V., or John Barth’s The SotWeed Factor. Barth or Pynchon become a central nexus, attended by works by Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass—postmodernism appeared to find its root within American experimental fiction. Whether to claim that national origin or to leave the postmodern a global phenomenon seems irrelevant in the midst of these first decades of the twenty-first century. Critics agree that modernism was the twentieth century, but they disagree about how much of the twentieth century remained to initiate, and then to harbor, postmodernism. Attempting to locate the movement of postmodernism within the United States leads to a retracing of earlier definitions. Beginning with the 1950s, these terms may give the reader an array of not just the single word postmodern but these various, related terms: a. b. c. d. e.

Self-reflexive fiction Neorealism Anti-realist fiction Metafiction Post-contemporary fiction7

Each term pointed to work that included an unexpected dimension of political awareness, a kind of emphasis that had previously been less visible in any kind of fiction except perhaps the historical novel. Fredric Jameson, like Linda Hutcheon, Paul Maltby, and a number of European philosophers, insisted that any kind of writing would, in the necessity of the times of late capitalism, speak to the human concern with the state of the world. What resulted from the atomic disasters that ended World War II was not only the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States: it also encompassed “the erosion of the public sphere; the diffusion of concept-poor discourses which limit social understanding; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda apparatuses; [and] the corporate management of mass communications” (Maltby Dissident 1). In William Gass’s more direct statement from his 1970 book, “Naturally the artist is an enemy of the state. He cannot play politics, succumb to slogans. . . . The artist’s revolutionary activity is of a different kind. He is concerned with consciousness and he makes his changes there.” (Gass Figures 188–89). a. Self-reflexive fiction, or surfiction, was the creation of Raymond Federman, whose own fiction received much attention during the 1950s and the 1960s. As he wrote in his essay for the Columbia Literary History, this mode is characterized by “its gimmicks, its playfulness, its narcissism.” Accordingly, this fiction has become both interesting and potent, through its method of using “interrogations

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of self-reflexivity.” Federman links contemporary fiction with Don Quixote, with Tristram Shandy, with Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1959. He insists there is still ample fun to be had, by creating unexpected structures within texts. He says emphatically, The crucial difference between the kind of explicit self-reflexiveness one finds in the eighteenth-century novel, and that at work in the novel (the new novel) written in America during the 1960s and 1970s, is that the former reflected upon itself, unveiled its secrets, questioned its possibilities in order to establish itself as a genre, as a respected genre, at a time when the novel was considered frivolous and even immoral, whereas the latter used similar techniques to extricate itself from the postures and impostures of realism and naturalism. In the first case it was a question of establishing a continuity for the novel, in the other it was a matter of creating a rupture in order to revive an “exhausted” genre—a genre that could no longer accommodate and express the extravagant notions of time and space of modern reality. (Federman Columbia 1145) b. Neo-realist fiction, in the words of novelist-critic Malcolm Bradbury, was defined through its association with the state of the contemporary political world. The Englishman Bradbury accordingly linked what Federman had called “the absurd and the arbitrary” (1151) with the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Roland Barthes (and in the practice of creating fiction with Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov). Identifying what he calls this particularly American strain of the postmodern, Bradbury assesses the fiction that appeared in the 1950s: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, John Hawkes’s The Cannibal, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man. He does not include Invisible Man, though once the self-consciousness about race that determined the power of both African-American and Native American fiction had been erased, both Ralph Ellison and Gerald Vizenor, particularly the latter’s Griever, An American Monkey King in China, would be recognized as postmodern. Bradbury emphasized that what was being written during the 1950s and subsequently was “a different kind of realism,”8 dominated in most cases by “pervasive skepticism” as well as “sharpened absurdity and narcissistic self-awareness.” He acknowledged that “throughout postmodernism the tensions between realism and the metafictional paradox remained [often] within the metatexts themselves—in Barth, in Vonnegut, in Pynchon, in Hawkes, in Coover.” (Bradbury Columbia 1141).9 c. Anti-realist fiction is a term mentioned in several discussions of the postmodern, as if to negate the hard-won qualities of “realism” and “naturalism” from fifty years before. As Maltby explains, the separation of parts has long been outmoded: postmodernism conjoins “three fields of thought: postmodern esthetics, post-structuralist philosophy and literary theory, and post-Marxist sociology. Postmodernism today is . . . an unstable term that is fought over and selectively appropriated on behalf of various theoretical projects.” Maltby provides this historical

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note: “Postmodernism as a literary-critical term arrived in the late 1960s: then it was just one designation among others (e.g., metafiction, antirealist fiction) and did not achieve its status as [all-inclusive] until the 1980s” (Maltby Dissident 4, 14). d. Metafiction was the term used in the 1980s to emphasize the artificiality, the sheer evidence of self-consciousness that many postmodern writings evinced. Naming characters with the author’s name, creating dialog that usurped various roles within the text, directly addressing the reader, speaking to the reader in coded language or in parentheses—these were the more obvious strategies chosen to let readers and viewers feel a part of the “end game” of the writing. Patricia Waugh’s book Metafiction was a standard reference, providing not only examples but apt definitions. Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox appeared the same year (1984); between the two, they charted such works as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, Steve Erickson’s The Sea Came in at Midnight, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and works by Kenneth Patchen, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges. Gass had used the term early in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” (in his Fiction and the Figures of Life), where he discussed the role of authorial consciousness in creating the reality of fiction. As he often did, Gass drew on Henry James, making clear that the genius of James’s writing was never dependent on a single facet of his style. Rather, he praises James’s “consummate attention to detail, such musical skill, such morally perceptive art. . . . The work works to fashion itself in the same moment it is shaping Henry James and James is devising it.” Gass establishes the postmodern ingredients in his critique of James: “A sentence is a length of awareness. Henry James makes us conscious of that. Its pace, its track, its jittery going back, its gush, its merciless precision” (Gass Habitations 194, 196). The distinction of reading James, says Gass, is that no other writer can duplicate the effects of his prose. Gass describes the special level of their artistry without falling into parody. . . . Their work cannot be successfully counterfeited, even by another genius. The Beast in the Jungle could not possibly be by Beckett and Happy Days could not possibly be by Barth. Out of the same long list of words we all use . . . each artist achieves an intrinsic uniqueness, and this is because what the culture can accomplish, by and large, is in their case, and, through their skill, perfected. “Perfection.” It is Matthew Arnold’s word. (Ibid. 201) e. Post-contemporary fiction—Jerome Klinkowitz created this term as a means of shaking off the difficulties of repeating “contemporary” after “contemporary,” when time was passing and changing, as were the qualities of whatever esthetic state was being considered (Federman Columbia 1143). Returning to Gass’s formative and principled discussion of the way a writer chooses to make his language distinctive, one finds immediate satisfaction in his linking philosophical truths with language. Gass writes “To know is to possess

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words, and all of us who live out in the world as well as within our own are aware that we inhabit a forest of symbols; we dwell in a context of texts” (Gass Habitations 207). Ignorance is no excuse. He writes, Consciousness is all the holiness we have . . . it ought to become continuously more inclusive, more knowing, more self-regarding. . . [in its specific application to the work of Henry James] James’s language no longer communicates in the ordinary sense, because it communicates too much, too carefully; because it is conscious of its own character, as the highest culture must be. . . . these sentences demand the impossible: they want every element related; every relation enriched; every meaning multiplied; every thought or sensation they contain, every desire or revelation, every passion, precisely defined and pushed to its finest and fullest expression. That is why they are celebrations—not informations, placations, injunctions, improvements, vacations for the body or the mind.They are, indeed, as particular and well wrought as we are, for we, in our way, are works of art and celebrations, too. (Gass Habitations 202)10 Gass’s praise for the writing of Henry James is a consistent positive example through many of his philosophical/literary essays. In contrast to his attitudes toward James, he writes about Theodore Dreiser, whose novel Sister Carrie had come back into vogue, that Dreiser wrote as if words had little resonance, no sound, no shape, as if their inscription were invisible, and he employed a syntax as uncomplicated and casual as a wad of cotton. He is a preliterate novelist, and indeed we do soon wish to pass through his words to the world he is asking us to imagine. The pornographer is preliterate in the same way: the dirty deeds he lets us look at lead us to overlook the dirty window through which we are watching them, except, of course, for the dirty words he may use, which retain their unclean interest. Henry James feels a larger obligation, and plumps his page like a pillow, for he is literate to a fault like the golden bowl’s. (Gass Habitations 150) In a definitive study of modernism and postmodernism, that written by Gerhard Hoffmann and published in 2005, the origins of postmodernism are again said to be political: the movement “evolves out of the specific condition of the sixties, it reaches beyond the sixties and becomes the signum of a whole era and its social and cultural trends,” probably best expressed by Lyotard’s theories. Hoffmann spends time on Marcuse’s definitions of personal freedom set against social freedom, as he points out the great political activity—and anxiety—of the 1960s in the United States (Hoffman From Modernism 33–35). American critic Joseph Dewey’s more specific political gloss tied postmodernism to Reagan’s two-term presidency, as he points out

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the literary response to the emerging definition of Reagan’s America registered not the furious pride of the new patriotism, but unsettling fears, fears indeed keener than any felt in the American experience of post-Hiroshima since the delicate brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis. Like seismographs tracking shifts in distant plates, these writers measured tremblings in the night . . . these writers spoke to a community uncertain of its own oddly cantankerous rhetoric, ill at ease with the chest-thumping arrogance and casual obstinacy of its own patriotic quasi religion. (Dewey Dark 180) He points out later that “the fictional voice adopted the studied cadence of the evening news and developed plot lines that could emerge as credible headlines. . . . Writers addressed . . . scenarios of a world reeling back to its beginnings, a world of ash.”11 Among the active writers of the time, Robert Coover, for one, remembers the received wisdom—that “we have come to the end of a tradition, . . . that our ways of looking at the world and of adjusting to it through fiction are changing” (in Gado 142). Aware of the publications of other experimental writers, Coover was steeped in the works of Barth, Pynchon, Gass, Gaddis, and Vonnegut. If there was any reciprocity between the weekly New York Times Best-Seller lists and the writing of Coover and his friends, it was at most accidental. John Barth, much more specifically, recalls the vicissitudes of the twentieth century’s literary trends. He summarizes that he and his fellow writers have been hearing about the “End of Art” throughout the century, when modernism arrived on the stage of Western Civilization. Picasso, Pound, Stravinsky—all felt themselves to be as much terminators as pioneers, and when they themselves did not, their critics often so regarded them: groundbreakers, yes, but perhaps gravediggers as well, for the artistic tradition that preceded and produced them. By mid-century we were hearing not only of the Death of the Novel—that magnificent old genre that was born a-dying, like all of us; that has gone on vigorously dying ever since, and that bids to do so for some while yet—but likewise of the Death of Print Culture—the End of Modernism, supplanted by the electronic visual media and by so-called Postmodernism. And not long ago . . . there was an international symposium on “The End of Postmodernism”—just when we thought we might be beginning to understand what that term describes! In other jurisdictions, we have Professor Whatshisname on the End of History, Professor So-and-So on the End of Physics (indeed, the End of Nature), and Professor Everybodyand-Her-Brother on the End of the Old World Order, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international Communism . . . endings everywhere; apocalypses large and small. . . . The end of this, the end of that; little wonder we grow weary of “endism,” as I have heard it called. (Barth Story 14)12

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Barth had spoken before about the importance—or lack thereof—of history, formally conceived. In his interview with Joel David Bellamy, for example, Barth said that the writer can turn “the adjective weight of accumulated history . . . against itself to make something new and valid . . . the use of historical or legendary material, especially in a farcical spirit, has a number of technical virtues . . . esthetic distance and counter-realism.” As he also told Bellamy, “the sum of history [is] no more than the stuff of metaphor” (in Bellamy 10). In a related move, in The SotWeed Factor, Barth creates various histories through his juxtaposing of Captain John Smith’s official narrative aligned with his “secret history.” Denying the truths of verifiable history was already a commonplace within early postmodernist work. Both Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges denied any real impact coming from legitimate history. As Borges wrote in Labyrinths, “the present is indefinite . . . the future has no reality other than as a present hope . . . the past has no reality other than as a present memory” (Borges Labyrinths 10). In the words of William S. Burroughs, too, the concept of history was likely to be dismissed as mere erudite abstraction. Burroughs wrote “there is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story,’ ‘plot,’ ‘continuity’ ” (Naked 221, italics Burroughs). Set in the matrix of history vs. non-history, according to Hoffmann, postmodern writers found themselves free to “play with possibilities of interpretations and evaluation.” Barth succeeds, particularly in The Sot-Weed Factor, in creating differing strands of history through his selection of narrators. His concern with duping history was much less evident in his two early novels (Hoffmann From Modernism 293). The fascination with recorded, and verified, history was ordinarily associated with the modernists’ concern with time, a fascination which writers from Henri Bergson to T. S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens to Gertrude Stein expressed. Discounting the attention paid by modernists to these concepts, Hoffmann contends that, for postmodernists, time is liberated from the “usual” forms of sequentiality, causality, and other meaninggiving schemas that restrict and humanize the force of time. It develops new forms of time [through] montage. In postmodern fiction the perspective on time and history is not dualistic as in modern fiction but multi-perspectival, and includes in true postmodern manner existential, epistemological, ontological, as well as comical, parodic, self-energizing viewpoints. One is aware of the constructedness and the ambivalence of all time concepts. (Hoffmann From Modernism 288) To illustrate his notion of difference, Hoffmann discusses William Gass’s novel The Tunnel, particularly its protagonist, the American historian Kohler. Setting himself the “impossible” task of writing an introduction about both the United States and Germany for his book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, Kohler

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is faced with the ridiculous dream of impartiality. He concludes, about his readers, that “we were happy because we had no history. . . . History is the abyss of the doomed” (Gass Tunnel 108, 185.) As this critic explains the characterization Gass achieves, he broadens the confessional mode to create Kohler and his interpretative dilemma: “Kohler is incapable of isolating reasons for what happened under the Nazis, to establish uni-logical chains of causality. He always has to face the simultaneity of mutually exclusive determinants, and thus is unable to confront meaningfully the crucial epistemological, ethical, and ontological questions, including the questions of the meaning of history” (Hoffmann From Modernism 290). Gass “reclaims” the “confessional power” for his book by distinguishing fiction’s concern with particularity . . . from history’s task of analyzing the universal. This ability makes Kohler an artist adverse to generalizations. Hoffmann then quotes Gass: “History, as I see it, can strive for the universal. My objection to it is simply that it rarely, reasonably, does. . . . For me fiction isn’t an alternative to anything . . . and it doesn’t strive for universals. It merely makes particular things out of universals” (in Bellamy 35). For Gass, too, the different approaches to time help create postmodernism from the modern. He speaks somewhat acerbically about the well-established modern writers (here including Barth), Joyce and Beckett and Barth and Borges expect a jaded eye, one already blackened by its most recent round in the ring, chary of future blows, not a bit innocent, for whom all the action, the incidents, the tension and suspense, are well known and over, dead and gone. The steamy sex sits in a cold pot now; and only perfection, complexity, and richness of meaning, depth, resonance, a resourcefulness surpassing Ulysses’ . . . only feeling, song itself, satisfies . . . suits. (Gass Habitations 156, ellipses Gass’s) In Brian McHale’s recent assessment of the beginnings of the postmodern, he presents a compatible idea by grouping Gass’s Omenstetter’s Luck with Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists. He describes them as “modernist” works, focused on the interior lives of characters. But then in 1966, McHale points out, fiction shifts. Gass writes Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife; Coover, The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Dramatically different from the first novels published, these works illustrate what McHale calls “the brinksmanship of the novels of 1966—their quality of remaining poised at the very brink of postmodernism, without quite toppling over into it—is readily illustrated through two examples, one relatively unknown, the other celebrated: Charles Wright’s The Wig and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. A dark and extravagant satire of American success stories of the Horatio Alger type, The Wig signifies on—that is, ironically reenacts and rewrites that indispensable novel of African-American modernism and postmodernism, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).”13

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When Gass turns his attention to later postmodern works, including Barth’s Letters and Gaddis’s JR, he describes shifts in the very process of reading. He notes that these are great works of the twentieth-century imagination. To begin them at all is foolhardy: to quit early is to lie to your friends. These works require everything; they expect nothing. They are, and are symbols of, the art of our time. Perhaps their length will eventually be forgiven them, their difficulty overcome; perhaps even their art will be forgiven; but who will forgive the cultivation they require, their intelligence? (Gass Habitations 157) Paralleling Stanley Elkin’s emphasis on point of view as central to “art,” Gass often approaches significant esthetic principles from the perspective of personal anecdote. Elkin treats Barth’s accomplishments in Menelaiad as if any reader could understand what the author had accomplished. He speaks more directly about Gass’s experimentation: the narrator at the still center of the turning town in William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”—what the muse, speaking always in the tongue of personality, tells me: It is fiction itself, in some special, synecdochic, part-for-the-whole sense, for all stories drive all other stories out as surely as all music drives out all other music. Elkin concludes, aphoristically, “All writers have only one or two things to say.They say yes or they say no, or shades of yes or shades of no” (Elkin “Preface” 194). Writers of the 1960s often discussed Gass’s writing; his experimentation set boundaries few authors could match. Gass himself occasionally spoke about his writerly aims, though he was more appreciated for his throwaway lines such as “We are made of layers of language like a Viennese torte” (Ibid. 206). Insistent as he can be about time and a book’s originary form, Gass spares his readers the specifics of his imaginative processes. He does recall about Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, however, that its text was “the body of a woman of generous morals and much misuse, so that I once felt it might be appropriate to provide those who thought to enter it with a condom which would serve double duty as a book mark, so safeguarding their journey. But the symbol was too sexist, the publisher too chary. My present novel, The Tunnel, is dominated by the trope of its title. The text is at once the hollow absence of life, words, and earth, which the narrator is hauling secretly away; then it is the uneasy structure of bedboards, bent flesh, rhetorical flourishes and other fustian forms, which shapes the passage, and which incontinently caves in occasionally, filling the reader’s nose with noise, and ears with sand and misunderstanding; while finally it is the shapeless mass

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of dirt, word-dung, and desire, which has to be taken out and disposed of. Every tunnel invokes Being, Non-Being and Becoming in equal portions and with equal fervor. (Gass Habitations 159) The reader is reminded here of Gass’s earlier statement about the postmodern that “one does not read A Public Burning, Degrees, or A Bad Man the first time in order to read it, but to ready oneself to read it” (Gass Habitations 156). Without seeming to be exclusionary, the postmodern esthetic creates an iconoclastic and reciprocal group of intent readers, avid and erudite, insistent on determining the source of the political impetus, the strategy of the shaping of the fiction, and the pleasures of the finesse of language. Again, Gass admits that the postmodern novel is inordinately ambitious: “there is simply so much to do, so many ends . . . to tie, so many bases to touch, so many details which must be made essential” (Gass Habitations 158). Gass is at his best when he questions esthetics as a given. His fluid prose about the art of writing is comforting, but his tenacity comes with his interrogations. One of his recurrent questions is ‘What is fiction?’ He points out the confusion in genre distinctions by following Borges’s tendency to call an essay a story and, similarly, a story an essay— to establish connections between texts through the trope, or to try to fasten all the levels together, to form forms. . . .The trope sometimes begins in sameness, and then careens toward difference.This book is full of letters, it says, and then we find that it is not. Equally often, it begins its work at a distance—the text is a grave, it says, a sphere, a building, a box—and then approaches like the villain in a horror movie: closer and closer. (Gass Habitations 158–59)14 John Barth’s Letters serves in this meditation as an example of a false trope [where are the letters of the title?], yet Barth is generally credited with successfully creating a myriad of postmodern forms. Barth appeared to be the master of improvisation— creating The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in the midst of suicidal despair; The Sot-Weed Factor in his incorrigible need to create stories, often contradictory ones; and in 1968, the unusual mélange of Lost in the Fun House: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. There in the crosshairs of the excavation of print, with film and media impinging on the usual methods of conveying the word, Barth presented his title piece, “Lost in the Funhouse,” with its edgily naïve adolescent protagonist Ambrose. In his visit to the carnival funhouse with his family, Ambrose infuses the staged bildungsroman (complete with the beautiful girl) with his all-too-believable teenaged angst: younger brothers live on intermittent planes—reality being only one of those available. In his expose of Ambrose’s nagging private responses to his family, his older brother, his romantic yearning to have a girlfriend, Barth carves out a miniature of what had been his techniques earlier in The Sot-Weed Factor.This

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miniaturization makes “Lost in the Funhouse” seem different from what Linda Hutcheon describes in fiction “that works toward a critical return to history and politics through—not despite—metafictional self-consciousness and parodic intertextuality.This is the post-modernist paradox, a ‘use and abuse’ of history that Nietzsche, when considering that subject, never contemplated” (Hutcheon Politics 61). Relying on the reputation of postmodern writing as game, Barth here draws on typographical tricks, parodic stream-of-consciousness, and direct address to readers. His employment of juxtaposed quotations from unknown sources adds to the complexity of Ambrose’s embarrassed state of mind: random instructions to readers, ornate word choices, references to specific books and authors—made not by Barth’s characters but by an omniscient narrator; digressive sentences explaining Ambrose’s parents’ lives, and particularly that of his Uncle Karl, a mature male whose presence is both sexual and threatening—or threateningly sexual. Barth also creates a matrix of Ambrose’s anxieties—never getting into the funhouse, or again, never getting out of the funhouse. In the first third of the novella, the devices of postmodernism are explicable—and as Barth uses them, they encourage readers to stay identified with Ambrose in his hellish though reticent self-consciousness. “Lost in the Funhouse” maintains a relatively stable protagonist’s self-consciousness— unlike Barth’s creation of Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera.There, Gass explains, Barth is not to be seen. Andrews is writing his own story, but he immediately points out how limited his powers are: he cannot imagine, he is stuck with the “truth.” Andrews says, “I look like what I think Gregory Peck, the movie actor, will look like when he’s fifty-four.” Gass notes that The comparison to Mr. Peck isn’t intended as self-praise, only as description. Were I God, creating the face of either Todd Andrews or Gregory Peck, I’d change it just a trifle here and there. When a fictional figure speaks to the reader the way Trollope spoke to him, and as Todd Andrews not infrequently does, he intends the reader to become a fiction. How else will they hold a conversation? (Gass Habitations 275)15 Barth, too, brings his reader to this point of interrogation in “Lost in the Funhouse” when he asks, “Is there really such a person as Ambrose, or is he a figment of the author’s imagination? Was it Assawoman Bay or Sinepusent? Are there other errors of fact in this fiction?” Shifting from the misperceptions of the characters to the questioning of the literary critic is another feint of information—or misinformation. Finally, as Ambrose becomes literally lost in the funhouse, after leading readers through vicissitudes of sweatiness and ardor, as well as imaginative panic, he wonders whether his life will forever remain “unadventurous.” Here Barth sets up the reader to investigate the formal genre divisions of fiction—adventure, quest, bildungsroman, romance—and concludes with what is increasingly a charmingly real story about a teenager, flush with incredible vocabulary and knowledge of

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literature, hesitant to voice his thoughts about his family, and increasingly mired in the self-reflection that marks much postmodern writing. Or, in Ambrose’s interior language, “He wonders; will he become a regular person?”16 In Gass’s (related) commentary on Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” he explained to American readers that Barthes wanted to “rid the world of that confident, coldly overbeating, creator” (the author). Gass sees this attitude as a means of forcing readers outside narrow conventions, allowing them to see the interstices of identities that exist between character(s) and creator, extended through multiple readers. In Gass’s explanation, Nowadays, when the artist deliberately disappears, he may wish it to be thought that his work “must came about naturally.” . . . In this case, when the artist hides, it is in order to represent skill as instinct, intellect as reflex, choice as necessity, labor as slumberous ease. (Gass Habitations 267) Most of the postmodern writings did not illustrate the uses of the self (of the characters, the author, the reader) so dramatically as Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Less flamboyant in its structure, relatively free from juxtaposed extraneous elements, narratively direct, this novella brought the reader’s attention again and again to the central consciousness: Ambrose, whether or not he represented John Barth, whether or not he could himself sort through the meandering time frames and event cycles described in the work, came to life in a deft and seemingly accurate portrayal. To pose the explicitly postmodernist question, as Gass does, is to create seemingly unnecessary complicity between author and reader. In Gass’s prolegomenon, Every author has an identity, but masterpieces are written by the human mind, not by human nature, which only lends them their common smell and color . . . the works of the human mind are really addressed to other human minds. . . . The ordinary author,17 then, may be no more than a blender of tales . . . but Roland Barthes is not hailing the death of these authors—inevitable anyway— but the death of the real ones, so that their texts may survive in the hearts of their readers. (Gass Habitations 285–86) Something new and compelling was afoot, and writers and readers alike combined to create a nexus of appreciation—in their minds as well as their hearts—for such works as Gass’s Omenstetter’s Luck, as well as Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife; Barth’s The Floating Opera,The End of the Road, and The Sot-Weed Factor; and Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. These works became more and more familiar to American readers. Like the nowfamous characters drawn by Borges and Camus, personae from the early works of American postmodernists have their own enthusiasts. Foreshadowing Gass’s Kohler in The Tunnel, it is in Omenstetter’s Luck that Reverend Furber admits, “So it is with

16  The Origins of the American Postmodern

us. So it is with me. . . . Buried in the air, I rot. Moment by moment, I am not the same” (Gass Omenstetter’s 201). Unwieldy, darkly humorous, strikingly unconventional, the figures from early postmodern fiction shake lose all kinds of forbidden reactions in the readers who read and study them so devoutly.

Notes 1 The Nobel Prize for Literature was given to Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O’Neill (1936), Pearl S. Buck (1938), T. S. Eliot (1948), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962), Saul Bellow (1976), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Toni Morrison (1993), and in 2016 poet/musician Bob Dylan. 2 Rejected by many publishers, the novel was eventually published in 1966 by New American Library, after two segments of it had appeared as stories in the little magazine Accent. 3 Larry McCaffery calls this text the most significant critical book of the 1970s: “fictional systems such as the novel are, in fact, fictional. They are symbolic systems of signs and relationships which are freely constructed and have no necessary connection to the world” (McCaffery Metafictional 23). 4 The Tunnel seemed an exacting illustration of what Patrick O’Donnell was to say about “postmodern identity”—calling it “fluid, heterogeneous, and carnivalesque” (O’Donnell Latent x). 5 With Daisy Buchanan from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby as a lead protagonist, Sorrentino’s novel may have too easily traced pop culture for its readers; the substantial interest Mulligan Stew attracted when it first appeared diminished quickly. 6 As Jeremy Green stated a decade ago, Dissatisfaction with the idea of postmodernism has been present from its inception. The word is at once hyperbolic and conceptually fuzzy: the “post” of postmodernism asserts an epochal change without providing any indication of what characterizes the new era. For many, postmodernism seems to be a quality—a deficiency, perhaps— that one attributes to the other. (Green Late 1) Green is seconded by Katrin Amian: Postmodernism, it seems, is history. Born as a shorthand for the new contemporary in the 1960s and 1970s, grown to maturity as a lively disputed critical concept in the 1980s, and mainstreamed to the popular appeal of Dummies’ guides and Pepsi cola ads in the 1990s, the term appears to have exhausted its potential as a means of describing and understanding the shifting alliances of literary and cultural production in the new millennium. (Amian Rethinking 1) See also Irmtraud Huber Literature after Postmodernism (2014). 7 As David Brauner discusses the difficulties of using the word “contemporary” in his 2010 book Contemporary American Fiction, the word “describes something that is in a sense logically impossible, since, in the time it takes to describe, define or otherwise fix that which is current, it has already been superseded” (Brauner Fiction 1). 8 Among the best treatments of the reciprocity between the postmodern and the Cold War, the visible manifestation of “politics” after World War II, are Dewey’s In a Dark Time, O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies, and Maus’s Unvarnishing Reality. 9 Bradbury also pointed out more current practitioners by mentioning what he called “the very various work of writers like Walter Abish, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates,Toni Morrison, Robert Stone, Richard Ford and more.” T   o this today’s reader must add what Alan Ramon Clinton calls “encyclopedic” authors: “Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, Douglas Coupland, Evan Dara, Don DeLillo, Umberto Eco, William Gaddis, William Gibson, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

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James A. Michener, Georges Peres, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Queneau, Ishmael Reed, Salmon Rushdie, Bob Shacochis, Leslie Marmon Silko, Phillippe Sollars, Neal Stephenson, William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace” (Clinton Intuitions 194). 10 When Ezra Pound edited the special Henry James issue of The Little Review in 1918, he wrote in his own testimonial essay that James never wrote an unnecessary word. In The Pound Era, critic Hugh Kenner devoted many pages to summarizing James’s importance during the years of imagism, early modernism. 11 Among the expected writers from the postmodern period—William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Walker Percy, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon—Dewey listed other writers who probed this political unease: Bernard Malamud, Russell Hoban, Paul Auster, David Brin, Tim O’Brien, John Calvin Batchelor, Susan Morgan, and Denis Johnson (Dewey Dark 191). 12 Since the 1967 publication of his essay, “The Fiction of Exhaustion,” in the Atlantic, Barth had been self-conscious about people calling for the end of conventional fiction. His point was that newer tendencies from such writers as Borges, Beckett, and Kafka were changing the novel as written (Barth Friday Book 62–76). 13 McHale Cambridge 32–33. 14 As Gass had explained in an interview, innovation is useful, but “my complaint about Barth, Borges, and Beckett is simply that occasionally their fictions, conceived as establishing a metaphoric relationship between the reader and the world they are creating, leave the reader too passive” (Gass Conversations 5). 15 Gass uses one of Borges’s parables as illustration. He references “Borges and I,” in which Borges writes “I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may continue his literature, and this literature justifies me” (Borges Labyrinths 246–47). 16 McHale points out here the genius of postmodern style. He uses William Burroughs to illustrate the skill involved in rewriting other writers: calling this “self-rewriting,” he describes the ways Sorrentino rewrote “all of his early novels later on, in the eighties— Steelwork (1970) as Crystal Vision (1981), Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) as the trilogy A Pack of Lies (1985, 1987, 1989), and his road-novel of 1966, The Sky Changes, as Blue Pastoral (1983).” He then attends to the way Barth uses “self-revision,” rewriting all six of his early novels, including Giles Goat-boy, in LETTERS (1979). “This practice of doubling back on oneself—in this case, returning to one’s own texts and re-imagining them—is another of the signatures of 1966” (McHale Cambridge 45). 17 Earlier in this section, Gass had distinguished between what he called “the artificial author” (the author which the text creates, not the author who creates the text). He says of that author that he “will be importantly different from the one of flesh and blood” (Gass Habitations 283).

Suggested Further Reading Federman, Raymond. Surfiction: Fiction Now—and Tomorrow. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1975. Gass, William H. Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.

2 THE BOOKS THAT SHAPED DIRECTIONS—COOVER, PYNCHON, DELILLO, WALLACE

From its beginning the American postmodern assumed an international flavor. As John Barth published his increasingly parodic fictions, he moved between the French existential fictions of Camus and Sartre back into the rowdy humor of Sterne—and Nathanael West. Similarly, the philosopher-writer who expressed some of the most erudite of postmodern principles, William H. Gass, referred frequently not only to British modernist writer Samuel Beckett but also to Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, whose parables became illustrative set pieces for the postmodernists’ varied ideas about new definitions of the author as “self.” Gass also brought into current discussions of esthetics the Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov (at the time teaching world literature at Cornell University, where the large audiences for his lectures may have included both Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison). Nabokov’s controversial—but intentionally comic—novel Lolita appeared in English translation in 1958. It served, as did William Burroughs’ 1959 Naked Lunch, to make the experimentally comic one of the lynchpins of the postmodern. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the full weight of the often-vexed term postmodern was acknowledged, American publishers knew only that the new was worth including in their catalogs. They had determined this as early as 1952, when Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was a surprising seller (even without identifying Ellison as an African-American writer—the floodgates for non-white writing had not yet been battered, but readers who bought fiction were clearly in search of whatever appeared to be new and, hopefully, relevant to the chaos of the American 1960s). As Paul Maltby points out, the word postmodern was not yet in daily use: as a critical term, it had arrived in the late 1960s, but “it did not achieve its status as all-inclusive until the 1980s” (Maltby Dissident 14). The instability of the term was never a mystery: aligned with politics, history, and social activism, postmodern as a designation had to respond to quickly changing circumstances. As Gerhard Hoffmann explained, part of the difficulty of readers’

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assessment of postmodern fiction was that the valances of history kept changing— the more common of which faced the danger of becoming a cliché. When Hoffmann discusses Robert Coover’s 1977 The Public Burning, these shifting histories are his major concern with the writer’s representation. These are the problems that Coover faces in The Public Burning, a novel about the Rosenberg trial, the conviction of husband and wife as Soviet spies and their execution in a burlesque fantastic scene on Times Square. Coover quite consciously chooses a historical “boundary-situation” that can be dramatized. For him, “the execution of the Rosenbergs had been a watershed event in American history, which we had somehow managed to forget or repress . . . but it was important that we remember it . . . or else it can happen again and again.” (Le Clair and McCaffery Anything 77–78) Coover’s attitude towards history cannot be ambivalent: it’s a kind of confrontation with History, the liberal dogma of History, its sacrosanct nature borrowed from the authority of the Bible, it’s also a kind of enhancement of it, a celebration, a deep respect for the moment itself, which I’m trying to make more vivid, more memorable—more “real,” as it were. (in Ziegler and Bigsby 91) As Hoffmann discusses the various effects of Coover’s choices in The Public Burning, he emphasizes that point of view was a challenge. Coover himself had said that he “wanted someone who lived inside the mythology, accepting it, and close to the center, yet not quite in the center . . . an observer” who was “a self-conscious character” and who “has to analyze everything, work out all the parameters . . . worries about things with a somewhat suspicious view of the world.” Vice President Nixon “proved ideal.” The fact that Nixon narrates half the novel’s chapters “as he becomes more and more aware of the complexities of history, the falseness of ideologies, and the problematics of distinguishing between right and wrong, adds a questioning and confessional mode and also a comical touch to the book” (Hoffmann From Modernism 292). Several critics who discussed The Public Burning saw it as part of a dual move in contemporary fiction. Like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—drawing much of its substance from the events of World War II—Coover’s fourth book placed itself as part of a skewed reality. For Thomas Le Clair, Coover’s first two novels did not draw from history in the same manner: clearly warp and woof of fantasy, both the Brunists and the Universal Baseball Association, Inc., were colored with Coover fantasy; not so The Public Burning. In fact, the inclusion of Vice President Nixon made prospective publishers so nervous that many of them did not even consider the work. As Le Clair described his reasoning behind pairing The Public Burning with Gravity’s Rainbow, he finds in both “a voice of mastery.”When Pynchon and Coover

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draw from history, they distill it so that their allegiances are not exclusively personal; they frame the historical event so that their impetus to describe alerts what Le Clair calls “an evolving group mythos,” an appeal that manages, through the intricacy of its esthetics, to represent “the large realities of American public life, its business, politics, history” (Le Clair Excess 5).What Le Clair sees in these two books is the authors’ emphasis on comic absurdity, the parody. The reader must therefore use a grounding of common information and then cast the tonal net of the absurd over that information so as to understand the amalgamation the writer has created. (Both Pynchon and Coover, for example, are far removed from the heavily informative esthetics of either a Norman Mailer in his semi-autobiographical mode or a Truman Capote in his In Cold Blood subjectivity.) In the case of Coover’s The Public Burning, about the probably mistaken execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for suspicion of conspiracy to perform treasonous acts against the United States, his lengthy and unusually ribald treatment illustrates a number of the points of what one might call later postmodernism. The comedy of the original strategy, most notable in Donald Barthelme’s short stories and his 1967 novel Snow White, is one of Coover’s key structural motifs: his use of an orchestrated potpourri of language that not only fascinates but bewilders functions well here. One of the most unexpected strategies is his employment of Nixon as narrator for the Rosenberg story. But as in the best postmodern fiction, Coover’s choice of narrator is just one element among many unpredictable stylistic choices. With the utmost irony, The Public Burning is built on factual testimony from the Rosenbergs’ trial: the novel is a kind of symphony about the way United States politics at the highest level could condemn ordinary citizens to the most heinous—and the most public—of deaths, without any outcry from seemingly observant citizens. Most of the words in the operatic performance that is The Public Burning come from the Rosenbergs’ chargings, the accusations, the trial, the sentencing, the six appeals to the Supreme Court, the final 24 hours, the execution, the deaths, the children’s observations of their parents’ tragic ordeal, their lawyers’ observations, the public renunciation, and the public mourning. From the epigraphs (taken from the stage play about the debacle) to comments that seem intolerably ill-fitting by Pat Nixon and Nixon himself, as well as by Dwight David Eisenhower, to the dedication— “For Justice William O. Douglas, who exchanged a greeting with me while out walking on the old canal towpath one day after these events”—to the highly stylized Table of Contents, The Public Burning sets up a three-day tragedy, an Aristotelian tragedy, following those ancient and effective rules for delimiting action, supposedly so that no reader can forget the consequences of public ignorance. Coover’s Table of Contents shows an opera-like scenario.The four body parts of the novel, beginning on Wednesday with President Eisenhower’s news conference, and ending on Friday night with the actual execution (the section ironically titled “Freedom’s Holy Light: The Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”) are interspersed with what Coover titles “Intermezzo,” a (sung) oratorio that provides both information and emotional texture.The first of these is stoic and militant; it is “The

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War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness: The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower.” The second and third, however, create sympathy for Ethel Rosenberg (pictured in her earlier life as an actress and singer). The second is titled “The Clemency Appeals: A Dramatic Dialogue by Ethel Rosenberg and Dwight Eisenhower,” and in it her statements, taken from the legal records, are set against Eisenhower’s monolithic responses, largely the sentence, “I will not intervene.” The third is a poignant sung dialog, “Human Dignity is Not for Sale: A Last Act Sing Sing Opera by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” Filled with bluntly accurate lines (“we are the first victims of American Fascism. . . . The courts are mere appendages/ to an autocratic police force”) as well as protestations of the couple’s love, the varied turns (and attacks) of this section—some sections, solo work; others, duets—convey information in a moving pastiche. Coover fills the novel with aberrant scenes, as during the final burning, when Ethel’s body will not die.The panic among the guards who cannot understand why she still lives—augmented with the noise of the protesting crowds and the anguish of America itself—leads to a vaudevillian finale. Ethel Rosenberg’s body, held only at head, groin, and one leg, is whipped like a sail in a high wind flapping out at the people like one of those trick images in a 3-D movie. . . . Her body, sizzling and popping like firecrackers, lights up with the force of the current, casting a flickering radiance on all those around her, and so she burns—and burns—and burns—as though held aloft by her own incandescent will and haloed about by all the gleaming great of the nation. ( Burning 517) The novel’s epilog is titled “Beauty and the Beast,” and some of the references there suggest that Ethel has returned, but the woman who speaks seems to be Pat Nixon, so busy caring for her daughters that she does not attend as well as she might to Richard Nixon. The final confrontation is a reprise between Nixon and Uncle Sam, a figure long parodied and destroyed at intervals throughout the novel. The mock intercourse scene as Uncle Sam does literally fuck the Vice President (“My insides were rent suddenly with a powerful explosion, sending me skidding on my face several feet across the floor, and there was a terrific inundation! I seemed to be leaking at all pores and orifices,” Burning 533), only to comfort him at the novel’s end, is probably one of the primary reasons publishers feared libel charges. Of course, the ribald comedy serves primarily to underscore the fact that nothing about the Rosenbergs’ execution was comic. Neither did it appear—in retrospect— to be justified. Truly carnivalesque, The Public Burning illustrated a humor that relied on various kinds of extravagance. So far as achieving the comic, the postmodern creation of humor tended to rely on dark, almost gothic, ploys instead of on any ironic maneuvering that seemed reminiscent of either modernism or existentialism. For critic

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Elaine Safer, who borrows the term “high-tech paranoia” from Fredric Jameson, readers need to be taught to read for comedy. She contends that Pynchon, like Coover, uses comedy in everything he writes: “He evokes myths: he grants some and deconstructs others. He uses and distorts history through parodic intertextuality. He develops premises and rejects them. He frustrates our desire for order by ironically disassembling the text and its characters” (Safer “Dreams” 279, 283). Most of the postmodern writers during the 1960s and 1970s used this breakout extravagance in at least one work. For Clarence Major, for example, All-Night Visitors pointed a new direction, leading to his 1975 Reflex and Bone Structure. Major’s fiction was less predictable throughout than was Ishmael Reed’s more consistently parodic The Free-Lance Pallbearer,Yellow Backed Radio Broke-Down, and Mumbo-Jumbo. Reed’s choice to draw on African-American language, the practices of voodoo, and cultural tropes germane to these stable poles increased the popularity of his always humorous narratives. Humor abounded, though some of the writers who created it had short-lived careers. Bruce J. Friedman, John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Walter Abish, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Roth, Jonathan Baumbach, Herbert Gold, Donald Barthelme, Gerald Vizenor, Steve Katz, Madeline Gins, Saul Bellow, Susan Griffin, Kathy Acker, Lyn Hejinian, Ken Kesey, Rachel Ingalls, Jerzy Kosinski, Ronald Sukenick, Norman Mailer, Richard Farina, Joseph Heller, Shirley Jackson, Erica Jong, Susan Morgan, Hunter Thompson, Stanley Elkin, William Burroughs, and others—not all were known as postmodern-writers; many were absorbed into the categories of war novel, feminist writing, African American writing or—with luck—mainstream New York Times best-sellerdom. Judging from most of the theoretical writing during early postmodernism, humor was not a substantive negotiation; it prompted only slim reflections. Of far more importance was the relationship between writer and product—the familiar identity issues. Again, in a comparison that William Gass makes, “the ultimate fiction is the madeup syllabic self ” (Gass “Preface” 27). Put more dramatically, Gass states, “I was born somewhere in the middle of my first book” (Gass Figures 30). Although in neither of these places does he refer to Borges, he elsewhere quotes from that writer’s Dream Tigers: A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, boys, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face. (Borges Dream 93) It has been said that the twentieth century is the century of identity politics—which seems to run true for authorial identity as well as more generalized existence. Critics of postmodernism acknowledge that any arbitrary separation between author and writing may be just plain false. Whether writing is termed “a piece of imaginative prose” or “an adventure of the mind,” the phrases describe the same effort.

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By the time of The Public Burning in 1977, postmodern ideas of humor had solidified so that political humor—which lay at the heart of Coover’s success in this novel—shaped one dominant strain. But earlier in the 1960s—with both Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967)—readers gasped at the irascible, funky, often irresponsible comedy that made laughter easy, even if unlikely. Exaggeration ruled. So too did improbability, as if brightly colored comic strips had come to life. Whether the nuggets of humor lay in the grotesque, the speed, or the unlikelihood of many elements of the fiction, writers aimed for cumulative effect. In John Barth’s comments about his first two novels, The Floating Opera was a “nihilist comedy,” whereas The End of the Road was a “nihilist catastrophe” (Barth Preface vii). For readers of the early postmodernist novels, living in the midst of Cold War chagrin and postwar trauma, humor provided a leavening to the temper of the times. With The Crying of Lot 49 (considered in tandem with Pynchon’s first novel, V.),1 readers faced the mad imbroglio of confusing plots, macabre characters, unbelievable situations, and a suspended sense of real life that provoked interest as well as frustration. Pynchon begins the book as a farce: his protagonist Oedipa Maas is named executrix for a former lover’s will. With Pierce Invariarity, she remained as far from the truth as she is now—but the puzzle game had already begun. Steeped in the sexual as well as the trivial, Oed (Ed, who develops the characteristics of both male and hero as the story continues) finds herself defining the inexplicable. She seems not to realize that she has been dropped into a remarkably California novel, complete with wealthy real estate developers, Tupperware parties, illicit but unembarrassing drugs, rock bands, mercenary gangs, palm trees, convertibles, movie stars (at least when they were young), and sinister sub-plots. The reader’s takeaway, however, is that Oedipa—searching perhaps for a father, perhaps for an immediate purpose, perhaps for nonphysical satisfactions—must use the state’s multiple communication systems, among these the ancient Tristero mail delivery system. (It is California, home of high-level technology, so there are numerous electronics plots, manifestations of disguise, misidentifications, and finally deaths, mysterious deaths.) Everything about The Crying of Lot 49 is the gothic crossed with realistic or, perhaps more accurately, futuristic elements that mark both the state and the current residents clearly. Like the prose Pynchon has chosen to convey the novel, every detail, every action, takes only a few words—a clause, not a sentence—and so the reader travels, as does Oedipa, at great speed. The book is a paradigm of fast travel, with little time for either investigation or description. Pynchon works in shorthand— the name of an unknown rock group, the heart of a nest of newly built homes, the bewilderment at yet another story that is likely to be untrue. For all the emphasis on information, and all the characters’ privileged access, most figures in The Crying of Lot 49 know little. “Communication” may be, largely, smoke and mirrors. By using a female protagonist, Pynchon gives his readers a gender study: intent as Oedipa is on solving the various mysteries, she also is steadfast and determined— survival is her real aim. She is politely demure, letting the men in her life take the

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leads and obliging them sexually: this is her strong suit, complying with sexual demands, but she also sees how to use her sexuality to gain information, time, and respect. Respect is always alloyed with comedy, however. The novel has more outright laughs than anything Pynchon has previously published: it is a farce just as much as it might have been if written as a dramatic piece. Its message is never the simplistic “keep your chin up” kind of reading but rather a serious look at the fact that NO KNOWLEDGE may be forthcoming from the complicated information systems Oedipa comes to learn. Oedipa’s search becomes a recalcitrant illustration of the impossibility of knowing about life and, equally, the impossibility of knowing that any knowledge is pertinent. As critic Derek Maus summarizes, the reader must realize that Pynchon’s work evinces both “encyclopedic erudition and . . . wide-ranging cultural satire.” In one of his representative stories, “Entropy,” Pynchon makes clear the vacuity of formal knowledge and energy systems, emphasizing the roles of entropy itself in its “thermodynamic, informational, and cosmic forms. This theme recurs notably in the ‘Whole Sick Crew’ episodes of V. and throughout The Crying of Lot 49, most tellingly in the ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ portions.” (Maus Heath 2567). Without being criticized for “trendiness,” The Crying of Lot 49 is a computer novel. Pynchon plays throughout with the concept of binary choice, a contemporary adaptation of the earlier raced black-white dilemma. Just as the computer must decide between one and two, yes and no, and reach a conclusion after a process of minutely planned decisions, so Oedipa attempts to proceed in the investigation she is tasked with. Either this is so, or that must be. Inevitably, however, her program is faulty. Inevitably, a binary choice is inadequate. And so Oedipa learns to rely more and more often on her original, untaught characteristics, “gut fear and female cunning.” At several places in the novel, Pynchon attests to the futility of the binary. He closes Chapter 1 with Oedipa pitted against the “formless magic” of her reality: “she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey” (Crying 11). The author plays here with our expected order of progression—taking us from less satisfactory to more, from less bizarre to more—and in whatever continuum, element four does not fit our expectations. At the climax of the action in Chapter 6, accordingly, Oedipa’s despair with both her realization and her conclusions, Pynchon repeats the pattern—either, or; either, or (Crying 128 ff.) The novel proper closes with the same kind of entropic choice: Pynchon speaks about Oedipa and concludes, simply, by saying “Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist” (Crying 162). Lack of communication may be the blight that stumps her investigation, but within Pynchon’s closing scene, the selling of the materials that may be part of the historical meaning of the tristero (coded in auctioneer’s gloss as ‘lot 49,’ bringing all elements from before and since into the great gold and treasure hunt of 1849, leaving aside the natural detritus and carnage of the stormy searches that led to eventual prosperity, at least for some). Faces are covered, all social forms are extinguished, language—like numbers—has no impact,

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but Oedipa is a comparatively happy woman. She has come to the end of her quest. Even though she does not know how her search will end, nor does the reader, The Crying of Lot 49 confirms that life still operates on a pattern of beginnings and endings. During the early 1960s, it seemed as if the use of difficult humor occurred in American fiction of all kinds, not only the books that fit the description of the postmodern. Taking comfort in the ridiculousness of no-endings, American fiction during the 1960s drew from the war novel’s “humor” (as in Ken Kesey or Joseph Heller), as well as in Bruce Friedman’s Stern, or in James Purdy’s The Nephew. More literally comic was Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General from Big Sur. As literary historians quickly saw, some elements of what was being termed postmodern were appearing in works by Shirley Jackson and Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as well as in some Beat writing. Readers seemed to have found the short fiction form and were reading it with alacrity. After J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye early in mid-century, his New Yorker stories were more popular than ever. Many readers had originally found Salinger through those New Yorker stories. So too had Donald Barthelme made his way to novel publication by having written many New Yorker stories about his truly contemporary characters, people who resembled those Pynchon was so adept at drawing: separated from others through an almost paranoid shroud of protective knowledge. Barthelme’s characters were mired in useless knowledge, seldom appreciative of the natural world, and aiming head down toward those mantras of the earlier American novel—stability, wisdom, honest evolution.To date, there had never been any characterization of the American novel as frenzied, comic, erratic, misleading, or intentionally sexualized. This kind of impromptu—and pervasive—frivolity was not usually a characteristic of the novel in mid-century America. As Barthelme said at the time of his publishing Snow White in 1967, fiction represents a wide body of American readers, which he described as “pastless, futureless man.” He repeated that concept in Snow White, drawing from and embroidering on that ancient tale, “Our becoming is done.We are what we are. Now it is just a question of rocking along with things as they are until we are dead” (Snow 128). Moral imperatives buried under the skittish details of contrived humor, readers would not find directions for living in isolated parts of this or of any other country, or for rescuing the lovely Snow White from jealous women’s machinations. Snow White as Barthelme wrote it (a sexual romp for the most part—2with the seven dwarfs vying for position within Snow White’s shower) sets much seemingly extraneous discussion about esthetics alongside sheer, garden-variety sex. For instance, in the digressive sections Barthelme creates so well, avoiding ends as he strolls to his place of inclusive, he writes, We like books that have lots of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or, indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of “sense” of what is going on. This “sense” is not to be

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obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having “completed” them. (Snow 112) With no space break on the page, Barthelme’s text here moves directly to the comic scene of Snow White’s ordering her dwarfs to take off their pajamas. She recounts their actions, using each man’s name: “Hubert took off his pajamas. Clem took off his pajamas. Dan took off his pajamas” but then Bill refused to do so. In the author’s background description, “Bill’s pajamas filled the room, in a sense” (Snow 112). The reader is not, however, privy to the end of this scene. Language as comedy is not uncommon in modern literature, but Barthelme’s use of idiom and of simplicity—even while not dealing with simple characters— marks his fiction in a distinctive way. His characters do not use simple language because they are uneducated. Rather, they prefer to avoid erudition, “learning,” the appropriate locution. The author carries this technique of simplifying from language into structure. There are pages within Snow White that have very few words on them: a list of warnings, perhaps or some sentences that link one disparate plot to another. Toward the end of the novella, Barthelme focuses on the character of priest Paul, and several of the aberrant pages are about him. Set against this character is a plea from Snow White herself, claiming “no more will I chop their onions, boil their fettucini, or marinate their flank steak. No more will I trudge around the house pursuing stain” (Snow 141). As she questions the roles she has learned to play as fairy tale Snow White, the protagonist skips from identity to identity, slipping at times between the “interludes” that comprise the latter part of the novella. (There is also a page of songs written in honor of Emily Dickinson.) Critics claim that Donald Barthelme was the king of juxtaposition and fragmentation, and from those techniques grew his pervasive comedy, whether one reads his novellas or his countless stories. In critics’ minds, the fusion of his 1967 Snow White with Pynchon’s 1966 The Crying of Lot 49 is less a weakness than a complementary pairing. Basic tools of postmodern writing are shown to admirable effect in those two novellas. For Hoffmann, the segue between the short comic works and the novel he considers the apex of the postmodern, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, provides a way to fuse the works, not to separate them, by either length or seriousness of intent. In his critical schemata, all these works must be related through their uses of time. Hoffmann writes, “ The anticipation of the future (sometimes in the guise of reconstructing the myths of the past) is curtailed either to preconceptions of a catastrophe, i.e., apocalypse, (Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle) or the expectation of inertia, a state of spent energy, of entropy (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow; Gaddis, JR) or the anticipation of emptiness, for in Gass’s phrase, “[o]n the other side of a novel lies the void” (Gass Omenstetter’s 49).” Hoffmann continues,

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Since cutting off a meaningful past and a future that gives hope leaves only the present open, the present has to bear all the weight of making sense and must not end. . . . [The text then] aims at incompletion and limitlessness, at the imaginary, continuous moment, the flow of time, the creation of an infinite variety of possible worlds—in short, the filling of the threatening vacuum. (Hoffmann From Modernism 297) A further “or,” taking a page from Samuel Chase Coale’s Quirks of the Quantum (2012) reminds readers that there are many differences between the modern and the postmodern, but that the latter leaves behind Einstein’s basis for relativity. Instead, quoting Pynchon, Coale points out that “Everything is connected.” The world created in modernist novels exists separately and independently from the characters’ comprehension of it. In postmodernist fiction, that world more or less vanishes or lurks in the shadows, as indecipherable and mysterious as the quantum realm. There may be islands of insight and oases of observation, but the overall sense of recognizable and understandable events and circumstances often remains murky, blurred, uncertain, and forever out of human reach, constantly in flux. In modernism the reader can figure out what actually happened in terms of the plot and the landscape. In postmodernism she can never be sure and catches only glimpses and possible epiphanies of the volatile, shifting reality. (Coale Quirks 38, 30) For this critic, too, Pynchon set the tone for excellence in the postmodern period, though Coale chooses to discuss that writer’s 2005 novel, Against the Day (his sprawling work that begins with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair/Exposition and runs past World War I). Coale points to the structural absurdities—events such as the Mexican revolution, the Tunguska event in Siberia, Colorado’s labor troubles—jammed in time and space, all illustrating “unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, and evil intent in high places.” Among the numerous characters Pynchon includes cameo appearances by Bela Lugosi, Nikolai Tesla, and Groucho Marx. And the author continued his interest in performances of gender by pitting the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience against the immense ship captained by Penelope “Penny” Black, a ship filled with pregnant women, encompassing as well parks and houses. For Coale, Against the Day is a typical Pynchon novel—“splintered, fragmented, and seemingly endless,” filled with “broken symmetries” (Coale Quirks 179). In it, once again, Pynchon celebrates outlaws in rebellion against all forms of authority, whether it be anarchist versus capitalism, sexual perversity versus sexual convention, the poor versus the wealthy, utopian dreams versus totalitarianism, the counter culture and hegemony . . . slaves and masters, entropy, and order.

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But Pynchon’s outcomes do not change: the outlaws lose to war. The novel is “another torturous tale of disenchantment and defeat” (Coale Quirks 178). The prominence of Pynchon in discussions of the postmodern is not whimsical: the impact of Gravity’s Rainbow was undeniable. So perfectly did Pynchon incorporate the sometimes hesitant inclusion of real politics that even his hefty humor in this 1973 novel was subdued, even somber. Readers could recognize the fear that Germany’s V-2 rockets instilled in all of Europe, including the American forces that were stationed there. It was a strangely technological plotline: when would the next German attack unleash more of the rockets? With a slim element of science fantasy, Gravity’s Rainbow changed the nature of the American war novel as radically as it had novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award in 1973. Patrick O’Donnell recently called it one of the “monuments” of late twentieth century writing, noting that “it defies any attempt to organize its multiple logics, or to explain all the connections between its manifold narratives” (O’Donnell American 30).3 Kathryn Hume breaks with much existing criticism by finding the novel filled with unusual promise. She calls it “a spiritual book” and sees the reader’s job as trying to fill the spiritual vacuum the United States still experiences (Hume Dreams 113). For many critics—Le Clair, Maltby, Dewey, and Clinton among them—the novel is a remarkable piece of writing, one that captures the mood of the times as well as providing a path for future comic, or pseudo-comic, writing throughout the world. Clinton describes “the influential wake left by Gravity’s Rainbow”; he is particularly impressed by the metaphoric range of Pynchon’s writing, noting that “a shirt is never just a shirt. . . . Determining the nature and significance of the novel’s ‘world’ is crucial to understanding the importance of community objects” (Clinton Intuitions 32, 45).4 The most exuberant critic of all about the importance of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is Brian McHale. Again in his 2015 study, he claims (as he had in his earlier works) that because Gravity’s Rainbow appeared in 1973, that makes the year a watershed in the history of postmodern culture. By almost anyone’s account, Gravity’s Rainbow figures as the most typical postmodernist novel—the model for all the postmodernist fictions that followed in the seventies and eighties, the one against which everything else would be measured. McHale writes authoritatively that Pynchon’s novel displays “the new technologies of organic chemistry, ballistics, and cybernetics, all implicated in the development of the V-2 rocket.” Its language is both esoteric and immediate. It also creates an unstable world populated by beings of heterogeneous reality status. Pynchon’s novel amounts almost to a summa of techniques and devices for foregrounding issues of ontology: techniques for pluralizing worlds, for proliferating levels of reality, for suspending reality between literal and figurative status, for

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unmasking the very process of bringing worlds into being. All narratives produce multiple possible worlds . . . but Gravity’s Rainbow multiplies alternative realities to the point where they threaten to swamp the novel’s “real world.” (McHale Cambridge 73) For Joseph Dewey, Gravity’s Rainbow, as title, fuses the damages of war with survival: the rainbow images the V-2’s destructive arc, promise set against murderous, indiscriminate hostile force. Dewey says, It is a modern configuration—gravity’s rainbow—that governs the apocalyptic world. . . : the relentless arc of the German rockets projected from continental launching sites and curving down into civilian London. This rainbow—bleached white and obedient to science and technology, politics, and the military—far from fulfilling the biblical promise of hope to the vulnerable, insures instead imminent decimation of those underneath its sweep. This rainbow does indeed belong to gravity, to the grim, predictable laws that lock even the planets into predetermined orbits, laws first described, appropriately, by Newton, whose simple laboratory prisms, demonstrated the prosaic nature of heaven’s spectacular rainbows. (Dewey Dark 149) It is a grim novel, despite its sometimes raucous, “animal house” comedy, much of it featuring defecation. As Dewey points out, however, for all the immersion in science and its chilling presences, Pynchon’s book is filled with misfires among the elements that science should control. The critic notes the many passages that describe “technological miscues, failed rockets, missed targets, premature detonations or descents.” It is less the actual functioning of the laws of science, implies Pynchon, than it is that every human being in the world has learned to think with technological principles guiding all mental effort. Echoing Larry McCaffery’s insistence that Gravity’s Rainbow changed contemporary literary sensibility as clearly as had Joyce’s Ulysses decades earlier, Dewey does not blink Pynchon’s understanding of the recent milieu (Dewey Dark 150, McCaffery Metafictional 262). Whereas Maltby sees The Crying of Lot 49 as a comparatively open-ended novel, its conclusion suspended through the carefully designed ending, this same critic sees Gravity’s Rainbow as steadily bleak. No hope exists while the enemy forces control technological supremacy (Maltby 158–59). For Dewey, however, Pynchon works to build in several endings, so that sorting through the second part of the book allows a kind of reader determination. Generally read as a novel of relentless despair, Gravity’s Rainbow falls into four sections. The first is the book in miniature, with Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake following their great love for each other. Dewey contends that the novel becomes a modern-day epic, and that the trappings of war/destruction/survival/and promise are integral to that generic effect. Premised on the concept that characters choose either love or silence, the story proper comes late in the section. Its opening is the panoramic scene of men at war, in

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retreat from the V-2 “screaming” across the sky. In the rainy dark, as the caravan of cars in retreat stops, the reader meets the occupants of a London apartment—these are Americans Captain Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice, Teddy Bloat, and any others who are up to making a breakfast out of Pirate’s massive stock of bananas.Yet as he prepares the fruit, he is listening: “He won’t hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you’re still around, you hear the sound of it coming in.” (Gravity’s 7–8). Whether Pynchon’s focus falls on this character or that, Slothrop or Tantivy, the Pirate or his friends, the scenes that accrue are poignant and well-placed. Men moving in the fear of battle, of the lightning-fast rockets, have no peace. In a glimpse of Slothrop that echoes through the novel, the author draws a scene marked by years of men surviving war. Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe dropped came near him. But this last summer they started in with those buzzbombs. You’d be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops—if it just keeps on, rising to a peak and passing over why that’s fine, then it’s somebody else’s worry. . . . But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this. (Gravity’s 21) Enveloping the early scenes here of men caught in the dour reality of war is the context of Christmas and its ceremonies. Hope leavens the fear, temporarily. Then Pynchon develops the first continuing set of scenes as Roger Mexico follows his love. Digressive as the fluid plot must of necessity be, since it continues to chart the war, London, the love relationship that is attempting to be “normal,” and the multiple personalities of the American servicemen, Pynchon creates lengthy sections that develop the plot between Roger and Jessica. Book I of the novel closes, for instance, with Roger’s realization that his relationship with Jessica has been so stunned by war that normalcy remains distant. As Jessica blows her nose coming from the bathroom, she tells Roger that she has caught a cold. Roger then thinks, but does not say, “You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me” (Gravity’s 180). The second part of Gravity’s Rainbow also apostrophizes the hope of love: Katje goes through the all-too-human process of making sure she has a heart, or, more accurately, making sure no one takes her heart. As an abused sex slave during the German occupation of Holland, the young Dutch Katje Borgesius knew that if she made a mistake, she would be sent to a concentration camp. As a belonging of the

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Nazi Captain Blicero, she was “caged, degraded, terrorized.” For Pynchon to open her section of the novel with what becomes a hilarious setup scene of Katje being trapped by an immense octopus—from which Slothrop must rescue her—is one of Pynchon’s great comedies. As Slothrop begins to see that the whole episode was staged, and that he has been conned into having a romance with the girl, his disdain for the operatives of war—no matter which country they represent—grows deeper. He comes to think of the girl as “seductress-and-patsy” (Gravity’s 210). Pynchon has never created one-dimensional characters, no matter how comic his intention. Katje, for example, here captures Slothrop’s attention in an intimate post-coitus scene. But now and then . . . too insubstantial to get a fix on, there’ll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him, that he’s even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As much a victim as he is—and unlucky, an unaccountably futureless look. (Gravity’s 210) Even after the most scabrous of sex scenes, Katje does not lose her positive characteristics. In Maltby’s assessment, the strengths of Pynchon’s skill in writing comedy resemble those of Barthelme and Burroughs: nothing is ever simplified. What Pynchon tries to do is “find a domain of meaning” outside of society’s regular codes. “Hence the innumerable artifacts and natural phenomena in Gravity’s Rainbow which are read and valued as alternative sources for meaning” (Maltby Dissident 171). For Dewey, too, Gravity’s Rainbow itself becomes “a method of surviving” (Dewey Dark 154). Looking fear, and its agents, square in the face—or, rather, its various faces—is in itself a hopeful stance. Exploring even the deepest crevices of the human psyche brings with it both discomfort and a fear that aligns with the combatants’ fear of German rockets. The reader has undergone the emotional rising of Roger and Jessica’s romance in Book I and a submerged kind of earthy resolution about romance, profiled in Katje’s uses as an entrapment device in Book 2. But as Dewey points out, with parts three and four, authorial intent seems confused (or, perhaps, geared toward the realistic). The syllogism of “Love versus Silence” comes to little resolution. And for all its invisibility in the last half of Gravity’s Rainbow, the war remains: readers do not forget that these are the closing months of World War II. Any panaceas that purport to work in relation to a major war must be scrutinized. For Part 3, what might have been a reasonable existence for Slothrop dwindles into stasis. Even though Oberst Enzian has not only promise but success, he has been a minor character throughout the novel, so readers feel his tendency to capitalize on existing circumstances becomes less dramatic than it might be. As he becomes the leader of Hereros’ rocket project in the Zone, he seems to erase the fact that he too had been Captain Blicero’s abused lover (during his childhood, when as

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a mixed-race bastard no one protected—or even noticed—him). As Dewey insists he survives all these abuses and learns “what there is yet to hold on to. . . . [He also] resists the notion of the system running down” (Dewey Dark 170). For Dewey, the outcome of Part 3 parallels that of Katje in her varied roles. Pynchon makes sure readers understand that the beautiful woman who seemed, in Slothrop’s eyes, to have such romantic promise has grown into a featureless mechanical kind of sex provider. According to this critic, Katje “can no longer find any essential humanness, can no longer respond to pain, to passion, to vulnerability” (Dewey Dark 165). She becomes Dewey’s primary illustration of the bifurcation he, as reader, finds existing in the second half of Gravity’s Rainbow. Not love but the rocket seems to be his continuing mantra. Dewey likens the two-part ending to an artist filming two alternate endings—one ending of “resistance and struggle” (Part 4) but the other, unfortunately, recording “assimilation and accommodation” (Ibid.). Gravity’s Rainbow was published to great acclaim in 1973. As O’Donnell has pointed out, readers and writers alike were then still reveling in what had been essentially a 1960s movement—or at least an effort—to focus the dramatic protests and outcries of the 1960s into an esthetic position. O’Donnell remembers, “From the Berkeley free-speech movement . . . to the militant revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from the inheritance of existentialism to deconstruction, the recognition of the multiple connections between language, power, and cultural identity have continued to inform the construction of ethnicity in contemporary American fiction” (O’Donnell American 21). The issue here has not yet become ethnicity of writers, although the appearance simultaneously of Don DeLillo’s early novels with Gravity’s Rainbow could be seen as a change from Pynchon’s white male authorial privilege to DeLillo’s somewhat marginalized voice; in the 1970s DeLillo had so little readership that he was sometimes referred to as a “cult” writer. In 1971 DeLillo had published Americana; in 1972, End Zone; and in 1973, Great Jones Street. Just as the fiction of Thomas Pynchon had overlapped and, in most critics’ minds, replaced what John Barth continued to write, so here on the most elevated of literary scenes—and with a ready international audience—appeared Don DeLillo. (Another notable book that followed Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow— William Gaddis’s JR, published in 1975—made less impression among the readers of popular, as well as postmodern, fiction. JR did win the National Book Award. It was an appealing though difficult story of a child’s taking over one element of capitalistic success but its narrative method—streams of unattributed dialog, speakers uncertain, dialog undistinguished [which was, of course, Gaddis’s intention] was seen as repetitive. The narrative of JR was at best a slogging through language that never caught fire.)5 Rather than stay with writers who had established themselves during early postmodernism, readers moved swiftly to search for other authors—as well as other books—that spoke to the familiar, heady postmodernisms. In the case of DeLillo, it took him another half-dozen novels, starting with Ratner’s Star in 1976 and ending with White Noise, to reach the apex of public and private readership that had marked the acknowledged success of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. In 1985, twelve years after Gravity’s Rainbow had appeared, DeLillo’s

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White Noise seemed to be an extension of the earlier fascination with World War II. Nearly forty years after Hiroshima, as if commemorating the atomic bomb and—in a macabre way—Hitler himself, DeLillo convinced readers that the war-inflicted paranoia that had been so familiar to Pynchon still mattered to readers. DeLillo’s White Noise benefited from the pedagogic advantages readers found in it. Unlike ponderous novels with spotty narratives, assorted and troubling characters, and difficult information sets, White Noise gave readers a chronological plotline, recognizable figures, and places designed to create comedy.6 As Henry Veggian makes clear, DeLillo learned his craft of writing fiction very slowly. He spent the first fifteen years writing short stories.Then between 1971 and 1985, he wrote and published his first seven novels, with White Noise coming at the end of that group of novels.Veggian quotes the author, saying that DeLillo worked “in relative anonymity, devoted ‘like a donut-maker, only slower’ to the craft of writing: a quarter century, 25 years, 300 months, 9,125 days (give or take a few, depending on where the leap years fall), 21,900 hours” (Veggian DeLillo 21). This critic points out that DeLillo was always interested in “writing about human time and memory as if it moved at a glacial pace” (Ibid.). DeLillo himself admitted to his consistent fascination with history and its varying events. He drew a distinction between factual history and a fanciful version, as in his creation of “Hitler Studies” in White Noise. Part of DeLillo’s progression in his novels after White Noise (Libra, Mao II, and Underworld) drew attention to his repeated use of history, often treated somewhat irreverently. He seemed interested throughout his writing in broadening the use of and the perception of the historical. Critics sometimes referred to his creating a counter narrative that served to both interrogate and to emphasize the actual. DeLillo admits, A fiction writer feels the nearly palpable lure of large events and it can make him want to enter the narrative. . . . The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements. (New York Times Magazine, 1997) Composing this essay the same year he published Underworld, a commentary that linked history from the Cold War years with authorial subjectivity—a tactic DeLillo had not previously used—brought the author more serious critical commentary than he and his work had yet received. The variety of DeLillo’s oeuvre (and following Underworld) places him in a category Andreas Huyssen would recognize and admire. Huyssen had long insisted that the postmodern should be drawn from new areas of information; otherwise, themes and associated characters would be repeating patterns from modernism. He suggested that writers draw from physics, biology, technology, the full range of sciences: Pynchon followed such an expansive directive and, judging from the subject matter DeLillo chose, he was in sympathy with this concept as well (Huyssen Divide 34). They also shared the belief that contemporary America was a wasteland

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of shopping malls, technology, and boredom, as DeLillo had described in his Americana.7 Readers found such an envious character in David Bell, Gary Harkness, Bucky Wunderlick, Billy Twillig and others; it was not until DeLillo’s creation of J.A.K. Gladney in White Noise, however, that the dilemma of living in the late twentieth century came alive. Filled as his world seems with the white noise of the title, Gladney becomes the victim of his own envy, his own desires, his own paranoia.Turning his condition into a profession, he finally lives through various stages of his dilemma and comes out the other side. He is not to blame when the railway car releases the poisonous chemical compound Nyodene D.Then, in the college town of Blacksmith, a place supposedly filled with promise and expectation, everyone lives with the threat of death. The inherent comedy of the novel stems from the indeterminacy of the poison—will people die? Will Gladney die? Reminiscent of such early postmodern novels as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise shames the atmosphere of contemporary culture as it shows various kinds of resourcefulness within the community. White Noise also, in Veggian’s assessment, is one of the very few postmodern fictions to see the family as a positive force within this complex culture; within the supposedly dying town, “a family [is] central to its narrative designs” (Veggian 56). Even if the Gladneys are a complicated amalgam of several different previous marriages, the family is the prominent factor in the story. Jack Gladney is not running away from his responsibilities; he is trying to preserve them. It may have been this combination of seeming realism, tinged even as it is with irony, and still encompassing the 1980s interest in science and technology that won for White Noise its National Book Award. In David Brauner’s reading, White Noise conveyed to its readers an “essentially conservative moral critique.” Despite the layers of irony within the novel, DeLillo makes clear that the villains are seldom the characters of the novel but rather the consumer culture of the late twentieth century. White Noise parodies the worlds of mass media and marketing, but it allows its characters to make human, not stereotypical, choices (Brauner 19–20). The play some critics found with a comparison to George Orwell’s 1984, given that DeLillo’s book appeared in that year, suggested its greatest irony. DeLillo had become one of America’s foremost late postmodern writers. With Libra, 1988, the insistence that politics become the foundational narrative for literature seemed to be fulfilled, but as critic Caren Irr noted, even though Libra was considered a work of “revolutionary fiction,” its political emphases were not predictable. Rather than history, such a work commented on its author’s involvement, as well as his sometimes idiosyncratic uses of history. In Irr’s assessment, “Libra, for example, oscillates not between Cuban and American forces during the Bay of Pigs invasion but between Lee Harvey Oswald’s would-be revolutionary perspective during this period and that of the CIA handler researching the subject” (Irr Geopolitical 145). The variations in abstract definitions of what “history” or “politics” meant in the context of a specific book—written by a specific author—were immense. In O’Donnell’s phrasing, the late postmodern novel might present “a complicitous

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relation,” presenting “a matrix of cultural pressures and forces that include nationalism, global capitalism, and the formation of identity” (O’Donnell Latent vii). Put another way, Irr contends, for example, that In genre terms, contemporary authors have found it necessary to rebuild the historical romance from the ground up, reversing the increasingly metafictional trajectory that led the concerns of Ernest Hemingway to mutate into those of Don DeLillo. Without entirely abandoning the critique of historical realism offered by metafictionists, writers of the past decade have supplemented its resources with elements drawn from narratives of the apocalypse. (Irr Geopolitical 143) Although both Libra and the novel that followed it, Mao II, in 1993, were nominated for major awards in fiction, it was not until DeLillo once again joined the aggressively and fundamentally pyrotechnically obvious focus of the American novel (one marked by what Irr termed “joyful logorrhea” in style) with his 1997 publication of Underworld that he saw his already high reputation increase. Part of the success of Underworld, according to O’Donnell, was the fact that it described much of United States during the years of the Cold War . . . its entanglements, its riffs, and its less-than serious ramifestations. The book begins with the 1951 National League playoffs, specifically with Bobby Thompson’s home run. That “event” is paired with the USSR’s above-ground explosion of an atomic bomb, simultaneously (O’Donnell Latent 150). Readers saw and experienced DeLillo’s use of real history. But as the novel’s title suggests—and as critics were quick to emphasize—in this novel underhistory was the effective history.8 In fact, what DeLillo referred to as underhistory was the significant record. The novel has the same title as the lost Eisenstein film (Unterwelt), which has been relocated and brought for a showing in New York. Starkly delineated in blacks and whites, visualization bears little relationship to any factual history. Not an accidental linkage, as O’Donnell contends, in Underworld, underhistory is the only history: the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis are related through a succession of Lenny Bruce routines; the violent racial conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s are symptomatized in the encounters between a white paranoid nun and “Moonman,” an African American revolutionary and graffiti artist; the conspiratorial political actions of the FBI during the cold war are represented not through the revelations of declassified files but through DeLillo’s rendition of J. Edgar Hoover’s homophobic obsession with cleanliness in his private life. (O’Donnell Latent 156) Comedy underlies the serious United States conflicts, which have become global. Just as Klara Sax watches the Eisenstein film, knowing she will create an

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art—“found art”—out of what she deciphers there, so DeLillo, according to Veggian, works through and under his own respective cultures, drawing on the languages, as well as everything he sees contextually, “to dramatize the artist’s role in this age of consumerism.” Veggian names DeLillo “the artist in opposition” (Veggian DeLillo xi). Critic Marni Gauthier considers De Lillo’s writing Underworld timely. The year 1989 saw the collapse of the USSR, and from August of 1990 through early 1991 the United States plowed into the First Gulf War. In Gauthier’s words “The 1990s became the decade for truth telling and redress: 23 of 29 such bodies [truth-finding commissions, around the world] were commissioned in the 1990s, including the most well known in South Africa” (Gauthier Amnesia 4) Set against this history, DeLillo’s depiction of world awareness seemed less and less fictional. Rather, it took on the aura of a conversation millions of American readers might have had after watching the evening news. Based on knowledge that was undeniable, the globalization of military conflicts held few surprises. The real and exacting surprise was the amount of comedy DeLillo incorporated into his novel. Another characteristic that Underworld featured was its accessibility. Critics have discussed the juxtaposition of kinds of texts throughout the book, but the novel’s opening sets the tone. In the midst of a clearly delineated ball game, which is attended by J. Edgar Hoover, comes this remarkable paragraph of information.Taking Hoover away from the crowded seat area, Special Agent Rafferty says to his boss, covering his face with his hand to disguise his message: It seems the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret location somewhere within its own borders. They have exploded a bomb in plain unpretending language. And our detection devices indicate this is clearly what it is—it is a bomb, a weapon, an instrument of conflict, it produces heat and blast and shock. It is not some peaceful use of atomic energy with home-heating applications. It is a red bomb that spouts a great white cloud like some thunder god of ancient Eurasia. ( Underworld 23) From the locution of “plain unpretending language” to the childlike descriptor “a red bomb,” the agent’s speech produces comedy: who IS this speaker and WHY is he working so hard to keep Hoover from becoming angry—with him, or with the situation? DeLillo writes what seems to be actual history but he undermines the reader’s relationship to that truth, largely through the language he uses to convey it. Early in the novel, a munitions worker tells “the latest secret” about the Cold War atomic bombs, “something that’s more or less out in the open but at the same time. . . . Secret. Untalked about. Hushed up” (in Gauthier 5).This critic uses DeLillo’s treatment of what Gauthier calls “the radiation-devastated bodies” to represent those layers of hidden history so prevalent in the late twentieth century. History, whether untold or unwritten or unrecognized, becomes less and less credible as a guide to the future: the dilemma for any literate civilization is that historical information becomes something less than reliable. Gerhard Hoffman says

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it bluntly, here “the force of history appears as the force of the grotesque, the (self ) destruction of humans by humans, but it is also the appearance of the mysterious.” Waste is the secret “underhistory” of the atomic tests, the garbage side of nuclear weapons; waste is the mysterious “underworld” in persons, relations and objects. Nick Shay, the waste specialist and main character of the book, sees waste “everywhere because it is everywhere” (Underworld 283). Hoffmann focuses on the word mystery: he finds no clear or rational description of events in DeLillo’s Underworld, but assumes that obscurity has been the author’s intention. He concludes his discussion with a reference to the epilog. “ The grotesque, the origin and foundation of the mysterious human ‘underworld,’ has its own image in the epilog of the book.” Nick visits a “downwind radiation clinic, called by the guide Victor the ‘Museum of the Misshapen,’ located at a remote site in Kazakhstan, the former territory of the Soviet Union, where the victims of the nuclear arms” race are shut away in order to be ‘studied’ in their misshapenness: It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each brow. It is the bald-headed children standing along a wall in their underwear, waiting to be examined. It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl who wears a t-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hapsburg, Germany, bottom edge dragging on the floor. It is the cheerful cretin who walks the halls with his arms folded. It is the woman with features intact but only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her shoulders like the crescent moon. ( Underground 800, Hoffmann From Modernism 632) To give DeLillo a last word here at the end of the twentieth century, the author speaks somewhat dismissively about his novel: “The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left for us to create the counter narrative” (in Colby Bret Easton Ellis 132). This is not to say that the postmodern became so utterly negative that what humor existed turned even darker than it had shown itself to be in the early 1960s, when Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 became everyone’s novel of pedagogic choice. The crying that existed in that title was that of a nameless auctioneer, being true to his commercial calling and selling wares of one mysterious kind or another. Thirty years later the shock of recognition—which included the realization that history was not truthfully represented in most books, interviews, or films—had led readers who had once been excited about the narrative possibilities of postmodern fiction to diminish to a smaller and smaller group of enthusiasts. Almost simultaneous with DeLillo’s Underworld, just a year before that book’s publication, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest, a novel that captured the interest of many, many readers. Despite its being a thousand pages long and containing 900 notes, Infinite Jest became the novel everyone wanted to be reading. It was a young novel, for one thing: the junior tennis circuit, a culture that appreciated drugs and a certain kind of hoydenism, a “go for broke” spirit—and the book almost

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announced that spirit. Its title helped its reception. Although postmodernism had early on been vaunted for its comedy, it had seemed to leave behind any fascination with humor. Most postmodern novels had trouble engaging readers. This novel, however, embodied the “jest” of its title. It reminded people of Gravity’s Rainbow, yet the first word of that quirky title, Infinite, created an impression that bordered on the spiritual. Larry McCaffery had published two anthologies in the mid-1990s, and in each he had featured the fiction of both Richard Powers (who had recently won a MacArthur “Genius” grant) and Wallace. McCaffery knew that the anticipated readers for postmodern books were aging; he was trying his best to introduce writers that he hoped would attract younger readers. In his 1996 anthology, Some Other Frequency, he included visual material, and type face changes, but his text was still, in large part, verbal. McCaffery had been working for a decade to make the postmodern remain appealing. Then, without any effort on his part, Infinite Jest appeared. As Stephen Burns described, Infinite Jest had a long gestation period. As Wallace explained to Marshall Boswell, he began the book, “or something like it, several times. ’86. ’88. ’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91 and ’92 all of a sudden it did” (letter). This finished book “worked” and “was alive” to the extent that Infinite Jest now stands, by common critical consent, at the heart of Wallace’s oeuvre. As his longest book, the novel deliberately overloads generic conventions, flaunting stylistic display and demonstrating an encyclopedic range of knowledge that courses through sport, national identity, addiction, media theory, linguistics, and mathematics. Yet for all the book’s intellectual plenitude and exuberant humor, it is also an anatomy of melancholy, and as the millennial self inventories its increasingly empty estate, the book becomes a harvest of souls, chronicling different ways to suffer. (Burns “Webs” 59) In the ebullience of the early reviews, all uniformly good, Wallace did not mind that Infinite Jest won none of the fiction prizes: instead he prized the readership he had garnered. But years passed, as did prizes and income, and eventually Wallace’s genetic depression seemed to become insurmountable. The triumph that was Infinite Jest, however, remains. And as Brian McHale describes that 1996 achievement, it seems to be the novel of the 1990s. McHale states that Wallace’s novels resemble Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, particularly in their inclusion of information. Both Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest “reach across worlds”: In Pynchon’s, the world is typically poised on the brink of legibility, but the act of reading doesn’t happen, or is outright refused. . . . Wallace’s text seems, by contrast, to affect a certain confidence that his world can be read. (McHale “Pale” 192)

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In this essay, which reads like a lament, McHale contends that Wallace was, in fact and in technique, a “post-postmodernist” descended from “Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.” He sees Nabokov’s Pale Fire as the primary influence on Infinite Jest but notes that, like Pynchon,Wallace showed in much of his prose—non-fiction as well as fiction—“a long-term fascination with institutions as macrocosms, and as world-building engines” (Ibid. 204). Refreshingly new as Infinite Jest appeared to be, louder critical applause welcomed DeLillo’s Underworld, as we have seen. It appeared that, for all the enthusiasm Wallace’s fiction generated, the books that marked stages of the postmodern had grown longer and more convoluted, relying for narrative method on juxtaposition and for comedy from sometimes faceless characters, who exemplified a kind of grotesque that Sherwood Anderson would have probably found unappealing. Readers who remembered characters from their reading in postmodern fiction thought more often of the figures from the novels of the 1960s and the 1970s than they did of postmodern works from the 1990s. It goes without saying that the important writers who had been categorized as postmodern did not stop working. The last chapter of this study will revisit such truly contemporary works as Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Zero K, as Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, as Barth’s Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative as well as his Cheever-like Where Three Roads Meet and The Development, as Coover’s Huck Out West, as Auster’s 4 3 2 1, as Wallace’s The Pale King, and as Gass’s Eyes. This body of writing is the best answer to Andreas Huyssen’s somewhat bleak conclusion that after the height of postmodernism, fiction had become directionless. He wrote in 1986 that artists and writers alike shared a sense of a fundamentally new situation. The assumed postmodern rupture with the past was felt as a loss: art and literature’s claims to truth and human value seemed exhausted, the belief in the constitutive power of the modern imagination just another delusion. (Huyssen Divide 34)

Notes 1 V. apostrophized searches for unknowns, whether political or sexual. With Benny Profane’s discharge from the Navy, he is left searching—the motif of that quest appears as well in The Crying of Lot 49. He joins Zeitruss’s Alligator Patrol, searching for albino alligators under New York; along the way he (and many other Pynchon characters) searches for the fluidly defined V. (an expat Brit, a German with an artificial eye, a mysterious woman involved in archaic plots, and other identities). The long novel becomes a shape-shifting puzzle. 2 A critic such as Gass would point out the surprising degree of self-consciousness that Barthelme weaves among his male characters. Snow White too becomes a try piece for self-reflection rather than a simple comedy. 3 In John Johnston’s important essay, he places Gravity’s Rainbow in the company of Gaddis’s JR and DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, along with Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge, one of the

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casualties of postmodernism’s exceptionally long fictions. Sometimes the “lost” book is Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew ( Johnston “Postmodern” 169). 4 Clinton points out, with some amusement, that in Gravity’s Rainbow’s 760 pages (about World War II), “it barely mentions Hitler or the Holocaust—i.e., it in no way is a traditional novel.” (Clinton Intuitions 45). 5 I disagree here with some critics, in particular with Jeremy Green, who describes the fascination readers had with Gravity’s Rainbow, JR, and Barth’s Letters as showing the express promise of the best postmodern writing. Green calls these works “books of huge ambition and formal daring” (Green Late 55). 6 White Noise attracted readers and teachers as had The Crying of Lot 49: in a one-semester syllabus, postmodern tomes were difficult to cover. Perhaps Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow could be studied in two or three weeks, but Gaddis’s JR and Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor would, together, use up what time remained. Later, DeLillo’s White Noise would remain a classroom favorite, even after Mao II and Underworld had received more critical acclaim. Similarly, Pynchon’s Against the Day seldom appears on syllabi, and one must speculate that Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1, published in 2016, will rarely be taught. 7 From DeLillo’s first novel, this touchstone statement: In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy, it is to dream. 8 Drawing one sense of the title from William H. Gass’s monumental novel, The Tunnel (1995), both David Foster Wallace (with his Infinite Jest in 1996) and DeLillo (with Underworld in 1997) played off Gass’s historian protagonist Kohler, who stated in The Tunnel, “There must be an underworld under this world, a concealment of history beneath my exposition of it” (Gass Tunnel 153).

Suggested Further Reading Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1990. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.

3 OTHER DOMINANT AUTHORS

The problems of isolating out a strand of one kind of fiction while American writers enjoyed being at the pinnacle of international acclaim are not only arbitrary— they are likely to seem fabricated. Any critic makes a series of judgment calls about which books—and which authors—deserve preservation in the annals of literary history. Even when there is agreement among different critics, predictions are never infallible. The revision of agreed-upon “history” is a practice so commonplace it surprises no one. The study of postmodernism prompts other kinds of self-consciousness. As the most contemporary of America’s fictional modes to date, it demands a thorough knowledge of the history of fiction both in the United States and internationally. It forces a recognition of globalization: if John Barth was a descendant of William H. Gass, he was also a descendant of Franz Kafka and Laurence Sterne, as well as a cousin of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Critic Lance Olsen complicates lineage even more through his references to Samuel Beckett, Umberto Eco, Anthony Burgess, Richard Brautigan, John Hawkes, Peter Handke, Italo Calvino, Garcia Marquez, Christa Wolf, Angela Carter, Gunter Grass, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and others (Olsen Circus 102). More recently,Amy Hungerford contends that “Making Literature Now” is far from a retrospective practice.The critic does not only judge. He or she, more than likely, participates. Accordingly, Hungerford draws her knowledge about her chosen title (Making Literature Now, published by Loren Glass and Frances Dore in their “Post 45” series) from her immersion in actual publishing (McSweeney’s, the publishing house, magazine, and cooperative under the aegis of Dave Eggers), in electronic publishing of various kinds, and through archival diligence relating to both Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace. Hungerford’s point is that as methodologies change, so too do perceptions. She illustrates this by herself admiring Foer’s work while treating David Foster Wallace’s with a kind of disdain: at the heart of the critical impulse remains individual taste.

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The wide-angle images Hungerford creates for her readers reinforce this aim as she describes it: While none of these writers would seem to matter to the course of literary history as it unfolds in real time, yet their work, and the work of others like them, provides a necessary fabric on which we might embroider in brighter thread the story of a figure such as Eggers. Without these workers, in other words, such a figure would have to be stitched into another fabric altogether. Franco Moretti, the early advocate of big-data literary study, has argued that traditional close reading is blind to the fabric: the practice skims along the formally complex surface of literary culture by examining the works within a tiny canon, when to read closely the actual literary production of a single year of the nineteenth century would take many lifetimes.The same is true of the contemporary literary production, in spades. The number of new novels published in the United States alone each year has risen from less than 10,000 in 1990. . . to upward of 55,000 in 2010. (Hungerford Now 13–14) Differing views of the fabric here may be a recasting of what Janice Radway had achieved in her 1997 A Feeling for Books, when she set the qualities of “middlebrow” readers who subscribed to the Book of the Month Club beside true “literary” taste. In her long prolegomenon of those qualities, she found more similarity than she had expected; and in her province as a “cultural critic” rather than a “literary” one, she was already nearing another exploration of Moretti’s shifting fabrics. Unlike Hungerford, Radway carefully tracks the ways in which privileging the uses of “literary” to connote the highest rung of discrimination stemmed from the political act of claiming that noun: to create a department of literary study, to create a profession, to exclude pretenders to advanced degrees. Any personal evolution of criticism was always self-serving (Radway Feeling 139–42). Whether one emphasizes how writing fits against the fabric of social context and of human communication, or instead sets some inherent quality as primary, the critical task remains: making choices, privileging one facet over another, distinguishing one effect from another. Critique is an all too human practice. Among the tasks this critique attempts here, given the caveats of both Hungerford and Radway, is some classification of the fiction that does not pretend to postmodernism. Obviously, not all American writers who became well known during the 1960s and 1970s claimed to be postmodern. The literary world continued to discuss “postwar” writing as the easiest way to group writers. Critics may have reviewed John Barth in the company of Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and Raymond Carver, but they felt no obligation to pair Barth with some other postmodernist. It became a pattern that few reviewers placed Barth in the company of any woman writer, even the few women who were considered postmodern—Rachel Ingalls, Kathy Acker, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates. Nor would a book by Barth appear in a review that mentioned even the most outstanding

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African-American fiction writers—Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Ralph Ellison. Even during the 1970s, when critics paid more attention to African-American writers than they previously had, they preferred discussing the work of James Baldwin because they could summarize the content of his essays rather than scrutinizing his fictional technique. Social science tended to take over after the 1960s political protests, whereas when readers critiqued a Barth piece, regardless of its date, they emphasized craft. And they also emphasized craft when they wrote about Saul Bellow’s work, or publications by other white, middle-aged, well-educated men who taught in creative writing programs at good universities. These writers’ books usually appeared from established houses such as Knopf, Farrar, Straus, Little Brown, and Simon & Schuster. Kathy Acker’s books, in contrast, were published by Grove Press (as were those of Charles Bukowski, who divided his books between Grove and California’s Black Sparrow Press). Books appearing from such presses were often ignored. Before any solidification of the category known as “postmodern,” contemporary fiction was often judged by its publishing outlets. J. D. Salinger made his reputation largely on working with The New Yorker to create his oeuvre of highly visible stories.That reputation culminated in the acclaim for his 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which gave readers a glimpse of character based on fragility (it was sometimes called “the breakdown novel” and was later paired with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar). Donald Barthelme, assured the cognomen of the postmodern, made his literary reputation through a similar route; and many of the criteria for slick magazines’ “Best Writers Under 40” stem from the publication of short stories rather than novels. For all the emphasis on the similarities among that agreed-upon group of postmodern American writers of fiction, actual literary history demands critical recognition.While the term “postwar” was still fully operative, and even as the monuments of the postmodern were already being recognized, two newly formed groups of American writers were also being discussed, and of those, one was expanding. For a society that avoided rubrics based on personal beliefs, it was hard for American critics to discuss “Jewish” writers, yet the two influential groups of writers, according to observers as disparate as critics Tony Tanner, Melvin Friedman, and Ihab Hassan, were the Jewish and the Southern.1 It appeared as if “literature” in the eyes of established critics—if writers must be American and not British or Irish—still constituted a general “mainstream” categorization of white men, often Christian. To keep this category viable, critics included the Canadian novelist Saul Bellow (whereas they seldom included such other Canadian writers as Alice Munro—now a Nobel laureate—or Margaret Atwood). One of these groups was that of Jewish writers, and it included not only Bellow but Norman Mailer, who since the 1948 publication of The Naked and the Dead had been considered the enfant terrible of postwar literature.Whatever Mailer published, in his increasingly wide-ranging and often experimental career, was unquestionably influential. From the start, Mailer’s fame was global. The fact that his work left a fairly traditional American realism far behind was part of his appeal:

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whatever new avenue of expression opened for the literary world was often related to Mailer’s innovations. As Maggie McKinley said in 2017, he published over 40 books and was also, consistently, a public intellectual, helping to found Village Voice and appearing regularly there and in Esquire, Commentary, Life, Playboy, and Dissent. No writer received more awards, more acclaim, and more negative criticism— particularly from feminist observers as well as conservative critics. In McKinley’s words, “Mailer remained devoted to his creative life, constantly attempting to break new literary and philosophical ground and refusing to rest on the laurels of his early success or to work within one particular style or medium” (McKinley Mailer 4). Divided as twenty-first century critics have been about some of Mailer’s writing, Christopher MacGowan stresses his importance to the memoir category as well as his ability to fuse genre forms successfully: if experimentation within literary categories marks the postmodernist writer, Mailer belongs in that category. He helped to create many distinctive elements of New Journalism in his search for a kind of confessional memoir (and non-memoir) that was new to American writing. When his 1968 The Armies of the Night, the account of his involvement in the march on the Pentagon in 1967, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and the National Book Award, the fusion between the personal and the political was forever changed. For John Aldridge, much about Mailer, including his attraction to crime, women, and various kinds of outrage, marks his affinity to the great American modernists, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. Aldridge contends that, of the later generation, only Mailer has their kind of appeal,“an adolescent ideal that is deeply rooted in the American mythos . . . the ideal of the writer as poet-profligate, our fantasy inheritance from the English and French romantics” (Aldridge Sun 111).2 From the perspective of twentieth-century fascination with craft, however, nothing the modernists wrote compared with Mailer’s oeuvre. His range of biographies and pseudo-biographies like Marilyn (1973), Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995), and others; his noir novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984); his cultural criticism like Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1971); the melded forms such as The Executioner’s Song (1979) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971), not to mention his historical novels such as Ancient Evenings (1983), give reasons aplenty for his prominence. Variety was the core of Mailer’s interest in writing, as he explained in his essays collected in The Spooky Art (2003). Philip Roth has never been so controversial as was Mailer, yet he has relied almost continuously throughout his writing career on his Jewish heritage. Mailer did not deny his family’s religious/ethnic roots, but he was usually more interested in wider cultural matters. Roth began his career with his prize-winning Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, winning the National Book Award. His fourth novel was Portnoy’s Complaint, a partially comic treatment of dynamics within a Jewish family run by a strong mother. As his themes darkened, he began to step into Mailer’s place, finally winning the Pulitzer for his 1997 American Pastoral, a novel that called attention to the changes in the country that had once compelled so much migration of those seeking the American dream. As he had lamented in 1961, contemporary

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experience “stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination” (Roth Commentary 224).3 As Richard Gray observed recently, in discussing Roth’s depiction of the Jew at the margins of the more central mainstream (Christian) characters, in effect placing Roth off-center from most postmodernisms, [these mainstream characters] possess a freedom from the past, a mobility and unreflective, unconstrained subjectivity that he can only look at with envy. This perception of ‘the Americans,’ as Portnoy calls them, is a mirage, of course . . . in many of his later novels, Roth has explored this mirage and the use of writing to reflect selfhood and nationhood. Much of the finest of this later writing considers the fate of a writer, Nathan Zuckerman, very much like Roth, so that the book itself becomes a mirror—or, rather, a means of gazing through the library window at other books. Gray’s summary is that Roth is concerned not only with personal identity, “but with the identity of America” (Gray Brief 271). In illustration, he takes the reader to Roth’s 2004 The Plot against America, seeing it as a capstone to the author’s late, more political, trilogy. Throughout Roth’s career, he has chosen themes that were timely, often subversive of apparent subjectivity, and always well-executed. Much of his writing shows the humor that readers in the late twentieth century had come to appreciate, particularly in the Zuckerman books. His body of work continues to chart a remarkable production of truly American narratives.4 Saul Bellow wrote less than either Mailer or Roth, but in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Capturing both Jewish readers and Canadian and international, as well as the literary mainstream readers and reviewers, Bellow wrote a series of novels built around interesting, and usually intellectual, male characters: his best-received novels illustrate the difficulty of staying true to the self in a chaotic world. He also began his career with the quirky humor a readership that understood postmodernism appreciated. Bellow was seldom linked with postmodernism, despite his often surprising innovation, and the generally somber tone of his later books—again, pitting contemporary horrors against a writerly consciousness of both trauma and technique—prevented his works from being connected with later considerations of the mode. Probably one reason for his winning the Nobel Prize was the stand-alone quality of his fiction: Bellow was recognizable, his concern for craft was notable, his place among the best writers of the later twentieth century was unmistakable. From his early works (Dangling Man, 1944, and The Adventures of Augie March, 1953) to perhaps his best (Henderson the Rain King, 1959, and Herzog, 1964) and on to the end—Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1969 and The Dean’s December, 1984—the force of his writing is unquestionable. What has been described as Bellow’s belief in “the integrity of knowledge” has kept his novels at the forefront of literary wisdom. Readers have come to expect this author’s moral message, even as he created varied vehicles for its delivery.

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The same could be said for the equally weighty achievements of John Updike. A poet and essayist as well as a superb fiction writer, Updike did not win the Nobel Prize, and he was never considered a postmodern writer. He was everyone’s writer: his fictions were best-sellers, many were filmed, his essays perfectly conveyed clearly stated opinions. Devoted to writing as his primary work, Updike performed all the services to the literary world that other writers might have felt were beneath them in that he judged myriads of contests, he spoke at all manner of programs and events, he was the world’s most modest (if famous) person. As kind as he was learned, Updike wrote with penetrating insight—sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully—and his novels were among the best of his publications. What he created in the first book of what became a five-book schema, with the poignant story of Harry Angstrom (who was his “Rabbit”) carrying Updike through the saga of an American man’s existence. In his 1960 Rabbit, Run, he established the pattern for the dissatisfied male, who unfortunately assumed he had the ability to make good choices, follow social mandates, and achieve happiness. Such a character proves the impossibility of making uniformly good choices, but in the confusion of Angstrom’s stages of life, Updike created a sympathetic persona.5 (The author’s fullblown treatise about American idealism based on financial power comes later, in his 1968 Couples, pointing to the fallacy of sexual satisfaction as an index of achieving personhood.) Within the various worlds Updike figured, he drew—as did Bellow and to a certain extent Roth—his philosophical direction from a set of European beliefs. He read widely; he studied throughout his college and post-college career, and he used the belief systems he found helpful. Gray discusses Updike in terms of the search for grace—or, perhaps more wistfully, the search for an understanding of the concept of grace. Updike had used a statement from Karl Barth as epigraph for his 1963 novel, The Centaur: “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him.” As this critic probes Updike’s entropic attitudes, he emphasizes that Updike is less dour than he is realistic. Gray also sees that Updike conveys a state of hope in the midst of visible cultural declines that surround him and the corresponding human fatigue that wears away his characters (Gray Brief 272). Rereading Updike in the twenty-first century reminds us that postwar American fiction, which seemed to have returned to a causal realism, was itself developing an experimental overlay. Even in Updike’s “Rabbit” series or his Henry Bech books, he probed often disguised complexities of the spirit. The imaginary scope of The Centaur, for example, points the way to some of his late novels, where a sympathetic view of a terrorized culture lends complexity to post-9/11 portrayals. The wealth of Updike’s hard-to-define fiction, all of it carefully cast, sheds light on the work of such other postwar writers as John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, and other best-sellers. Oates appeared among the earliest of mainstream writers now sometimes linked to the postmodernists. She was certainly one of the most prolific of postwar writers, and because she did not anticipate the themes of the feminist novelists to come, critics often moved her work back into traditional categories such as realism. As if

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following in Sinclair Lewis’s footsteps, Oates in her more than 120 books (of poetry, novels, plays, collections of stories, essays, and other nonfiction) was honest about mining the life that surrounded her. She may have begun with the Faulknerian novel Upon the Sweeping Flood (1964) set in her home territory of upstate New York, but she moved quickly to the Detroit suburbs—with not only depictions of the elite lives that existed there, in Expensive People (1968), Wonderland (1971), and countless stories—as well as to Detroit itself, for her most acclaimed early novel, them, 1968, which won the National Book Award. Strangely marginalized today, Oates wins few prizes of any kind; even critic Elaine Showalter seems to have little to point out about her body of work, beyond calling her “an American chronicler” and noting that class—as in them and in her 1967 A Garden of Earthly Delights, depicting a migrant family—initially preoccupied her (Showalter Jury 429–30). In her choices of subject matter, Joyce Carol Oates reified Lewis, and the fact that she was often nominated to the Nobel Prize judges because of that canvas of Americana created by her fiction should not have lessened her interest to all readers, and all literary judges. As her productivity increased and she sometimes published two books a year (some under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith), she began to lose the attention of the common reader who wanted to follow her work. The cost of reading Oates grew prohibitive. Her fiction illustrated techniques of both realism and fantasy, character-oriented narratives set against cultural prolegomena, violence writ large, pastorals that contradicted her tendency to rely on the gothic. She drew from a wide range of fabrics of both narrative and understanding. Oates’ work illustrates the range of critical comments made through the hundreds of reviews and essays and books about her writing. Because she has so often published reviews of other people’s work, as well as commentary about her own, one could formulate a set of principles that governed her work. As she moved from the observable tenets of the realistic to a series of fictions drawn more subjectively from the emotions of chosen characters, Oates continuously varied her methods. Her most recent novel, the 2017 A Book of American Martyrs, however, seems to revert to her early, realistic fiction. In this parallel account of one character, the doctor who performs abortions, set against the antagonist, the vigilante right-to-lifer who murders the doctor, realism grows into explosions of varied techniques—court transcripts mix with Biblical references. She spends page after page recreating the almost sub-literate thinking of the murderer’s older daughter, Dawn, who believes that her father is innocent because he has murdered at the direction of Jesus; his family, with Dawn at its center, lives a life poised on what she interprets as the words of Jesus. Life in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, however, strikes the reader as remote from any human existence. If realism fifty years ago was dependent on the author’s observation of details, Oates’ realism in 2017 drew from a Pandora’s box of techniques, both journalistic and New Journalistic, bombarding the reader until only that reader’s consciousness could decide the author’s intended “meaning.” It was not realistic, but neither was it postmodern—and it also was not feminist, although it was here “about” that most feminine issue, the right to abortion.

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As her title suggests, the country Oates fictionalized remained trapped in an ideological war that saw no chance of ending happily. Victims of rigid belief systems, grounded with the violence that permeated a place dedicated to making choices, with the freedom that its people could make choices, became “martyred.” The philosophical questioning that drove such writers as John Updike and Philip Roth here, in Oates’ capable hands, traced circle after circle of isolated questions. There was little hint of any resolution. A Book of American Martyrs left only a residue of various kinds of pain. Borrowing the words of Charles Newman from his early (and scathing) critique of postmodernism, one finds this section about realism. If we so heartily dismiss Realism because it trades upon a Positivistic world view, why do we then applaud contemporary work which also incorporates the pretensions of dated science—such as the entropy associated with closed heat machinery, or the systems theory already made obsolete by biochemistry and microprocessing? For every traditional enemy of plot, theme, character, and story, we have a hackneyed anti-version of destabilization, indeterminism, defamiliarity, and the artifice of knowledge. (Newman Aura 184)6 Oates has written a quantity of statements about the act of writing. In 1979, in a preface to an early collection of critical essays about her work, she described the vital importance, for her, of the act of writing. Since writing is a highly deliberate craft, one which demands painstaking experimental work, the writer tends to spend most of his7 time . . . sifting through various esthetic possibilities. Novelists are the most pragmatic of people. How to attain a specific end will quickly come to seem more important (because it involves ingenuity and labor) than what the end is . . . once the end is attained, the means are irrelevant. Moralists like to chide artists for caring more about their art than about morality; but an artist is, by definition, one who grows to care more about the interior workings of his art than about its external appearance, simply because he spends all his time on the interior workings; is fascinated, maddened, defeated, delighted, intimidated, or frustrated by them—no matter the “theme,” “subject matter,” “plot,” or even “message” will strike others as more significant. Moralizing, visionary, and skeptical impulses contend in most writers, pulling a work in one direction, and then in another. In theory a novel is this way, or that way: it celebrates the family, or attacks the family; it praises love or mocks love . . . in theory. But in reality, in the existential unfolding fact of the work, it is always something else, something indefinable. That the writer labors to discover the secret essence of the novel. (Oates “Preface” xii)

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This statement sounds a bit like the remarks being made during the 1970s by William Gass. There is nothing to be learned from a writer’s writer, which Oates intends to be, except that writing IS life, and that any means to accomplish work that satisfies the author is important work, crucial and life-giving work. Before hammering Oates’ countless examples of writing into a single, if varied, category, the reader must remember Janice Radway’s findings in her A Feeling for Books: The Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Never one to slot separate books into demanding categories, Radway emphasizes the readability—the pace of the story, as well as the appeal of story; the attractiveness of characters, the pull of a book’s technical proficiency—to what the committees of the Book of the Month Club organization used to justify their selections. Begun in 1926, the club brought hard-cover books into thousands of American households, most of them middle or lower class. People who lived so far from bookstores that they could not have had physical books in their living rooms were now becoming conversant with texts that they could read, and reread, easily. Like many other of the writers discussed in this study, Oates grew up in a household that belonged to the Book of the Month Club; she had an ear for readability that kept her novels and stories accessible.8 Oates always spoke kindly of the many thousands of copies of her books that being selected by the Book of the Month Club allowed her publisher to sell. Her directness about her being a commercial writer, “commercial” rather than critically acclaimed decade by decade, was refreshing—and never for a moment hurt her being included in one category or another. As Ellen Friedman had noted early in Oates’ career, Oates showed the tendencies of a person writing outside the vaunted male patterning—the patriarchal narrative that privileged fathers and sons, and what their patrimony might have endowed. While Friedman herself often privileged the writing of Kathy Acker, whose sometimes outrageous use of that male pattern had largely comic effects, she eventually wrote a good book about Oates’ writing and often chose to draw on Oates’ fiction to illustrate one break with convention or another. As she wrote about Oates’ Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Friedman noted that that bildungsroman pointed to two characters’ options that were definitely unexpected. Oates undermines a solidifying sense of closure in the achievement of these ordinary destinies by infusing the text with irresolutions and frustrated yearnings. She separates her two central characters9 from the rest of society and links them immediately to each other by making them accidental coconspirators in the accidental death of a classmate. . . . Jinx longs for a basketball scholarship; Iris longs for Jinx. Both are foiled by the master narrative. (Friedman “Constants” 146) It is Irving Malin, among others, who emphasizes Oates’ affinity with postmodernism. He compares her versatility and her experimentalism with the practices of

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both Borges and Poe. Malin says in his 1979 essay, “The real and unreal continually assault us—there are violations in every story—10and we cannot be sure about the sources.” He also draws from Oates’ “Afterword” to the story collection, in which she meditates about story as metaphor; she also implicates author as metaphor. Despite the stories’ distance from what Malin calls “conventional truth,” he supports Oates’ somewhat defiant contention that no art depends entirely on metaphor: rather, in Malin’s words, “they subvert conventional truth—and book design—by leading us into alternative worlds. They are marvelous, disturbing ceremonies” (Malin “Possessive” 41). In Joseph Dewey’s recent assessment of the way Oates can be considered a postmodern writer, one that he terms marked by “formal experimentations, yes, but with a heart,” he places as well Richard Powers, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ray Carver, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, and others (Dewey Chabon 2).11 In order to include Oates amid her contemporaries—Mailer, Roth, Bellow— I have taken liberties with the categorization of Jewish and Southern writing. Oates is neither Jewish nor Southern, and my fusion of the two fictions here leaves her stranded, without affinity. It has been true throughout Oates’ literary career that critics have used a variety of terms and characteristics to explain her writing. though as I borrow from Thadious M. Davis’s most recent study, Southscapes, this useful paradigm may come into play. Davis subtitles her book “Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature,” and her expansive definition of place incorporates a number of social and economic qualifications. Early on in her discussions of the writing of Louisiana writers Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and others, she notes that, for all the sophistication that now attends thinking about geography, “landedness” is real, and remains significant: “place is a powerful signifier of identity that cannot be overestimated” (Davis Southscapes 2, 6). What I am borrowing from this definition in order to give Oates visibility as a writer caught within place is the concept of Oates as Americanist, a United Stateser (in Dos Passos’ vernacular), one who takes all fifty states as her province. It is the rare writer who has, and achieves, that aim. An ongoing question here in the twenty-first century (when a number of journals and papers no longer publish reviews) is “What gives many recent writers a critical reception of note?” Put somewhat more bluntly, why is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates always reviewed while a work by her contemporary,Valerie Martin, is hardly noticed? To add to this complexity, the categorization of “Southern” writer remains vexed. Dating from the historical times of the Civil War, Southern as adjective is steeped in racial discontents; the words slave and non-slave resonating to the present day, fraught with protests about commemorating statues, memorials, and flags. Given impetus as a field of study, “Southern studies” followed the popularity of “American studies” thirty years earlier, finding respectability in a subset of American letters. To specialize in “Southern studies” provides a scaffolding of intellectual rigor—rather than allowing readers to rely on the terminology of “local color” and, in the case of the South, of the grotesque,12 if not the gothic.

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The discipline of Southern studies allowed for the study of such Southern writers as Walker Percy and William Styron, Richard Ford and Barry Hannah—many critics avoiding such equally Southern writers as African-Americans Ernest Gaines and Edward P. Jones, Alice Walker and Natasha Trethewey. One of the difficulties in studying the literature of the South is its problem with racial inequality; another is its still obvious problem with gender inequality. Women in the South (despite the portraits of strong women that Faulkner created throughout his career) were to be literal handmaids to husbands and fathers. In some respects, the South had not moved past the Civil War period in terms of either gender or race. The acceptance of inequality led to the South’s being seen as socially and economically backward, and the ironic portraits created by Erskine Caldwell in his novel Tobacco Road were often read as literal. Much of the discussion of Southern literature emphasized women writers, which put that categorization at odds with a similar grouping of Jewish writers. Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Spencer, Shirley Ann Grau, Lillian Hellman, Harriette Arnow, and other women were the writers critics discussed as Southern. These writers (outside the mainstream categories because of their gender and outside of “serious” fiction because of their use of comedy) paired closely with such homosexual and lesbian Southerners as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal,Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, June Arnold, Dorothy Allison, and others. Compared to the achievement of this stream of “outsider” writing, fiction by Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, James Agee, and even William Styron was sometimes less than compelling. Praised by many readers, Walker Percy’s stories, and particularly his 1960 novel The Moviegoer, moved the location of the American South into a postwar surround. Binx Boling had returned home after military service, but his life had never quite regained its energy. Boling was a runner, and the comparisons between Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Binx were frequent: never established, always searching, and seldom truthful about their motives or their fears, these characters shut out their innermost selves. In the case of The Moviegoer, even the suicide of his fiancée could not break through Boling’s carapace. Steeped in his impenetrable behaviors, Binx lived a relentlessly ordered life. To shatter his control seemed anathema, as if the horrors of war might come crashing through his carefully arranged existence. As the critics who compared The Moviegoer with Rabbit, Run realized, these wardamaged characters were, truly, placeless. Both men need saving from their posttraumatic states. Whereas Updike stretched Angstrom’s condition through decades of self-destructive choices, Percy creates a lament that is almost a dirge in his narrating Binx’s story. There is little sense of the South in its telling—unless the reader responds to the gentility, the propriety, that marks his character’s self-discoveries.13 Just as much of that psychological development remains partially hidden, the reader can project a novel written by a Southern woman, in this case South Carolinian June Arnold, whose work14 voices a woman character’s complaints in ways Binx Boling would find reprehensible. Setting expressive women characters against the

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war-damaged figures from The Moviegoer emphasizes the silence Percy uses to great effect in the non-telling of his women characters’ stories. The school of post-trauma fiction may exist less specifically in the South than in the United States as a whole, and even as Richard Ford (himself a Southerner) taps into the Percy milieu, his novels are more subjectively oriented. From The Sportswriter (1986) through Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2005), Ford has maintained an impressive reputation, but the changing geographies (and critical responses to the books) mark his work as having more than the limited impact sometimes connoted by the adjective “Southern.”15 The more classically Southern shows itself in the work of Truman Capote, whose earliest novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), breaks into readers’ comfort in spite of its eloquent style. Introduced to the New York publishing world by Carson McCullers, who built bridges for her fellow Southerner through both her agent and Random House, Capote found his book on the New York Times Best Seller list, selling 26,000 copies in just nine weeks (Fahy Capote 4–5). Despite a number of negative reviews aimed at its subject, the book benefited from the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Accordingly, Capote’s book sidestepped a number of readers’ objections. It was a kind of introduction to homosexuality, if one chose to see it from that perspective; and it presented lyrical images of the grotesque characters that McCullers had already made acceptable (in her fiction and on stage—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940; Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941, The Member of the Wedding, 1946, The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1951, as well as her plays.)16 For McCullers, a woman who championed a bisexual and urban lifestyle, helping Capote—as Tennessee Williams had earlier helped her—happened as a matter of course. Exploring various kinds of lives was the aim of her writing: Capote came to see the value of that pursuit. Other Voices, Other Rooms was never so famous as later Capote works would be, particularly his 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it was a moving depiction of a bewildered adolescent, a boy unclear about his sexuality, unhappy with his birth family, and willing to jeopardize everything he knew for a chance at the beauty of peace. Readers objected to the ending of the narrative of Joel Harrison Knox, a “delicate” 13-year-old, marked by “a girlish tenderness,” who leaves behind his Southern family and travels to live with his aberrant father at Skully’s Landing. That he remains there, in the midst of thoroughly suspicious sexual activities, was the disappointment: Capote was not rewriting Horatio Alger. He was projecting the existence of a new kind of sexual sophistication among American readers. Randolph Skully, the cross-dressing transvestite, has, in effect, plotted for young Joel to come to Skully’s Landing all along. Joel’s paralyzed father lives there (his condition the result of Skully’s love machinations), though he is powerless to prevent his son’s initiation into various paths to forbidden knowledge. The Landing houses other people, nearly all grotesque and forbidding, which early in Other Voices, Other Rooms marks its Southernness. The full effect, however, is only degradation. The reader must realize the appeal of that tawdry existence for the fallen Joel. Scenes set at the Cloud Hotel, which increase toward the book’s end, take

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on a protective dreamlike gauze, and remind the reader that each person’s emotional health—as well as sexual arousal—is particularly individual. Capote’s sense of fantasy undermines the reader’s tendency to judge. Ironically, Capote traveled to England and Europe with his New York lover, Jack Dunphy, as if life was influencing his fiction in reverse. He worked in journalism; he wrote fiction, but his next novel, Summer Crossing, never materialized as he had dreamed it would. Instead, Capote’s next successful fiction, The Grass Harp in 1951, returned to the South of his childhood and captured the poignant nostalgia that being an outsider, yet being able to see and experience an insider’s view, provoked. By 1958 Capote had matured technically enough that he could create the wonderfully real, if macabre, Holly Golightly, and his transformation to becoming a skilled observer of women characters was quickly recognized (Fahy Capote 5–7). Cormac McCarthy never appeared in surveys of Southern letters with much prominence until the late stages of postmodernism. His first four novels were set in Maryville, Tennessee, so perhaps the issue of the geography of the South itself was an issue. His first four books [The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979)] seem to have skipped the ingredient of gentility and focused instead on the deprived and their sometimes vicious sensibility. Often compared to William Faulkner, McCarthy seems to grow from the South drawn as an outpost, a site of vengeance so remote from human behavior that it strikes the reader, for many reasons, as placeless. Each of McCarthy’s books attempts to present a new South, a newly conceived and often rigorous locality for which new rules need to be written. As he emphasizes parts of America that are seldom seen in fiction, evoking a deserted culture where inhabitants struggle to be survivors whether or not they ape human behaviors, McCarthy is forced to innovate. (Many of the members of the Cormac McCar­thy Society today are postmodern critics.) His second novel, Outer Dark, for instance, focuses on the birth of a son to a poor couple, but the social tragedy at base is that the parents are brother and sister. The father, the mother’s brother, kidnaps the baby in order to leave him to die. The nihilism McCarthy creates blankets the narrative, and even if readers saw that the book was attempting to deconstruct either a Western sensibility or a romantic one, as David Brauner pointed out, the chief impact for a reader is an acceptance of lawlessness (Brauner Contemporary 183). More attention accrued to McCarthy’s second trilogy, perhaps because of films made, perhaps because the rigid expectations about Southern (and Western) fiction were breaking down as fiction in general displayed almost frantic innovation. His transitional novel, Blood Meridian appeared in 1985. Then came the Western trilogy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), followed by No Country for Old Men (2005) and, in 2006, The Road. For The Road, McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, even though his parable of that father-son relationship had lost most geographical ties.

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Whether praised by Barry Lopez for his use of colloquial language and the physicality of his landscapes, or admired for his incorporation of Biblical themes, or hailed as a newly realistic writer describing the lives of the poor, Cormac McCar­thy chose to write his own stories, regardless of their appeal to readers. He insisted that what he saw as essential themes for contemporary writing—homelessness, orphancy, and wandering—could remain stable no matter the technical trappings of each story. Richard Gray calls McCarthy “a literary hybrid,” fixed as he is in his aim of “reflecting the mixed, plural medium which, as he sees it, everyone inhabits now, and perhaps always has, the border territory that is our place of being in the world” (Gray Brief 275). Critics who have read McCarthy for his consummate, if varied, stylistic effects found a panoply of those effects within The Road. The novel has the powerful metaphors (“The days sloughed past unaccented and uncalendered”; 273), as well as carefully depicted action. At the start of the journey, with the boy’s father taking on the role of commander through the destroyed environment, McCarthy effortlessly brings the reader into the terrain: He slung their knapsacks over his shoulder and they tore through the crumbling bracken. The boy was terrified. Run, he whispered, Run. He looked back.The truck had rumbled into view. Men standing in the bed looking out. The boy fell and he picked him up. It’s all right, he said. Come on. ( Road 61) The pair hide from the truckloads of starving predators—this dystopia itself is commonplace, lacking food and water and shelter. Only the father and son are described, and as the father weakens and eventually dies from starvation, McCarthy has primed the reader to think the child will become food for those desperate hunters. But instead the author creates a ceremony of remembrance for the father, as he works the novel’s way to the boy’s finding safety with one of the few remaining good men. When the man finds the boy, he does not cannibalize the father; rather he wraps him in a blanket and leaves the boy with him to mourn in private: the boy didn’t uncover him but he sat beside him and he was crying and he couldn’t stop. He cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I won’t forget. No matter what. Then he rose and turned and walked back out to the road. ( Road 286) Biblical as this sonority seems to the reader, it does not close the book. Instead a voice from above blesses both the travelers and the narrative, again speaking in a language immediately accessible, sometimes bereft of punctuation. The Road closes with this paragraph:

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Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them, standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were mapping the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not be made right, again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. ( Road 287) Here, McCarthy’s plain-spokenness has mellowed to poetry, just as the emptiness of his narrative has been redeemed in its conjunction with the natural world. This is the kind of effect that prompts Christopher Lloyd to close his recent book, Rooting Memory, Rooting Place, with The Road—and, by implication, with Cormac McCarthy. Just as did Kenneth Lincoln and, even more recently, Ty Hawkins, Lloyd sees the stability of McCarthy’s finding a home for those wanderers, those eternally homeless characters that have peopled all his fiction. These recent critics all gauge The Road as belonging to the post-9/11 impulse, so that the bleakness of probable destruction is recognized but placed, subtly, alongside the promise still to be found in the natural world. In Lloyd’s reading, The Road has close affinities with Outer Dark, McCarthy’s second novel, both geographically and thematically. One of this critic’s most interesting comparisons between the two novels is that both are quest novels (in the earlier book, Culla and Rinthy Holme search for the lost child, their child, and the play on their family name is never lost on the reader). Like these characters, in The Road father and son are utterly “unmoored from any comforts” (Lloyd Rooting 136). Going further into a new argument, Lloyd sees that much of the “memory” within this 2006 novel is of the South, and the father’s remembrance makes clear how quickly facts and details will disappear with the decimation of the country and with his approaching death. The boy has no way of remembering what he will never have known. Without relying on such terms as postmodern, post-Southern, or transnational, Lloyd offers suggestions about the ways in which Cormac McCarthy creates a kind of philosophical stability at the end of The Road so that readers are not completely terrorized by its bleakness. The Road takes on the fusion of theme and movement that has characterized so many great books, whether or not the authors of those books ever received the recognition such accomplishments should have garnered. As I hope this survey of American novelists not expressly considered postmodernist suggests, a good bit of critical classification stems from positions taken by various reviewers. The vacillation in opinions about the writing of Joyce Carol Oates, for example, works to isolate her, even with her prodigious publication record, because the terminology used to discuss her fiction is so varied. In contrast to that

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example, the steadily changing opinions of the writing of Cormac McCarthy— especially considering the prizes awarded during the later years of his career—force the reader to accept the distillation of critical opinion as more than likely accurate. And, according to Amy Hungerford, today’s critic must also consider the effects of the remarkable films based on his work, a newly emergent and striking means of conveying the writer’s difficult vision. Hungerford speaks about a merger between social activism and literary conventions that, in the best cases, leads to different kinds of understanding and insight. She asks, How does the work happen in the traffic between people, their formation into a group, a coterie, an office, a class, an institution, a public, a counterpublic, a school, a neighborhood, a network? These are the terms of contemporary debates about method in literary studies, words that turn us toward sociology, toward the theory of public life, toward systems theory. (Hungerford Now 27)

Notes 1 See Tony Tanner City of Words; Friedman “Dislocations of Setting and Word”; and Hassan Contemporary American Literature, where the critics are allied in finding such Jewish writers as Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Roth, Malamud, Paley, and Singer of continuing interest, whereas the Southern writers mentioned (Welty, Spencer, McCullers, Grau, O’Connor) are largely women (after Faulkner) and often comic—presumably therefore of less interest. 2 For several decades at mid-century, American drama held authoritative influence over American fiction. Using Arthur Miller as representative of Jewish interests and Tennessee Williams as representative of the Southern, a reader can intuit their influence on the critical categories of “Jewish” and “Southern.” Miller’s plays revealed both urban mercantile stories and those of conflicted families; Williams’s were sexually oriented, especially in portraying gay sexuality, as well as gothic Southern behaviors. His 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire won the Pulitzer, as did his 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays and awards followed. 3 In a January 21, 2018, interview, Roth echoed that mood from so many decades before: No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one . . . could have imagined that the 21st century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times!

(Roth NYTBR 16) 4 Grace Paley, born to Jewish parents in the Bronx, may have been too “feminist” for the readers who valued Mailer and Roth. It was early when she began publishing short stories in the 1950s—too early for readers to care about women’s narratives (either stories written by women or about them). Drawing her fictional techniques from the emotionally based necessity of expressing the pain as well as the joy of women’s existences, Paley was accepted by the postmodernists because of her fragile, yet compelling, strategies. Often based in what seemed to be simply dialog scenes, her stories evoked a “me too”

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response in readers. She cared little for publishing a quantity of stories; it took her years before she brought out her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, in 1959. Rearing her children and being politically active absorbed the next years, and it was 1974 before she published her second book, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 5 The other “Rabbit” books are Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit Is Rich (1981); Rabbit at Rest (1990); and Rabbit Remembered (2001). According to Fred Svoboda in his 2018 study, perhaps a more impressive series to teach is Updike’s recounting of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century works, singling out The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Svoboda prefers a less male-centered novel, given that feminist critics have failed to see the truly ungendered narratives that comprise much of Updike’s solidly American world (Svoboda Understanding 96). 6 Newman’s further objections to postmodern esthetics relate to the creation of “abstract” characters; he mentions “Bloom’s precursors, Gass’s pseudo-artists, Trilling’s students, Gardner’s immoralistes” (Newman Aura 185). 7 Remote as it may seem today, the practice of specifying gender was not yet commonplace. The year was 1979; all polite writing used the masculine pronoun. 8 Oates had been well-trained in her college years at Syracuse University and, as she finished an M.A. degree at the University of Wisconsin, she became an elite reader and writer—as was, obviously, Raymond Smith, her husband who had been granted the Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin. As they taught in Detroit at Wayne State University and then at University of Windsor, they edited and published The Windsor Review, a journal, and later books under that imprint; when Oates moved to Princeton as a chaired professor, her spouse brought the journal and the books back to the States and became their chief publisher. 9 Set in the 1960s and 1970s, Oates’ characters are the African-American man who goes to Vietnam and the white woman who loves him, but marries someone else. Women writers who delve into this period often use science fiction, particularly to write stories that border on romance: Oates, instead, writes what seems to be conventional narrative but gives her reader a complete failure of expectations. 10 Malin’s essay reads Oates’ story collection The Poisoned Kiss, which plays with the concept of translation, plagiarism, and transcription much as some of Borges’s works did. This critic describes her lack of “fixed points” for many of her narratives as well (Malin “Possessive” 39–40). 11 Dewey explains this further in his recent study of Chabon, Understanding Michael Chabon. 12 Critical literature, for example, is full of such comments as Lance Olsen’s description of traits readers associate with the South. He discusses the kinds of details he finds in Nabokov’s Lolita: “This carnival-like gallery of the maimed, the incongruous, and the unnatural [that] delineates the American South for William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor . . . the misshapen, unconscious projections of an unhinged mind’s fantasies” (Olsen Circus 69). 13 Effective as Percy’s writing is, a reader might disagree with Fred Hobson’s comment that Percy “has become a more important writer than Faulkner; witness Josephine Humphries in Dreams of Sleep, Richard Ford in The Sportswriter. . . . [Percy is] an effective transitional figure, linking the old South . . . and the most recent of many New Souths.” (Hobson “Introduction” 5). 14 Arnold, born June Davis, published Applesauce (1966), The Cook and the Carpenter (1973), Sister Gin (1975), and Baby Houston (1987). As a lesbian and an outspoken women’s rights advocate, she modeled one strain of feminist writing for Rita Mae Brown, Dorothy Allison, and many others. Her publishing house, Daughters, brought much writing by women into the public eye. 15 Gray sees The Moviegoer as ancestor to Ford’s work; he also mentions James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, William Kennedy’s Ironweed, Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy,” and, more recently, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero in his category of books about the male character anxiously unmoored (Gray Brief 274).

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16 McCullers, with Flannery O’Connor, saw the disparity between what the “South” considered acceptable behavior for women and the reality of women’s lives there. Extending the subtle portraits evident in the writing of both Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer into genuinely comic fiction brought new and different attention to women writers in the South—although they remained comparatively marginalized.

Suggested Further Reading Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2016. Lloyd, Christopher. Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First Century American South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. O’Donnell, Patrick. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary United States Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Trachtenberg, Stanley, editor. Critical Essays on American Postmodernism. Boston: Hall, 1995.

4 POSTMODERNISM IN GENERATIONS

In his most recent book, The Tribe of Pyn, David Cowart makes the point that postmodernism moved in what he terms “generations.” He divides the customary list of postmodern writers—those usually considered a part of this grouping—into birthdays by decade, beginning with those born in the 1920s, where he placed such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Grace Paley, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, Ursula Le Guin, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Joseph Heller and others.1 The premise begins to carry additional weight when one reads the list of fiction writers born during the 1930s. John Barth opens that listing with his 1930 birthday; also appearing are Robert Coover, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Clarence Major, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Walter Abish, Cormac McCarthy, John Gardner, and many more. Cowart uses an illustration from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1941 novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, to make explicit the difference between a modernist conception of a novel and a postmodernist. He describes Nabokov’s showing the body of Sebastian Knight, himself a novelist, “lying spread-eagled on the floor of his study.” Sebastian’s explanation reveals Nabokovian art as well as his own: “ ‘I’m not dead,’ he says. ‘I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest’ ” (Cowart Tribe 3). A reader might well agree that postmodernism as an esthetic began with the work of John Barth (born in 1930), William H. Gass (born in 1924), and/or Gilbert Sorrentino (born in 1929). Judging from textual evidence, Barth’s work— which Don DeLillo read avidly—influenced the younger writer (born in 1936) a great deal. According to Cowart’s graphs, there are countless sets of chronological influences, as when Paul Auster, born in 1947, who began his writing life as poet, translator, and critic, published his first novel, City of Glass, in 1985, the same year DeLillo broke through the often-closed circles of the major fiction prizes by winning the National Book Award for White Noise.

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Readers of Auster’s City of Glass—followed later that same year with his Ghosts and The Locked Room, so that his New York Trilogy was complete—were ready to be welcoming, even if confused by the unexpected characteristics of the latter’s writing. Plot? Meaning? Character? Relationship between author and protagonist? Questions that pertained to both modernist and postmodernist fiction were still being asked in 1985, but readers of the postmodern were (usually) content to receive amorphous answers. In Auster’s Ghosts, for example, what the fictional character Henry David Thoreau thought about New England might well be as relevant as what the characters named Black and White thought about their profession of being private detectives. As Cowart puts it, [the modernist] idea of language falters before postmodern theory and praxis, in which signification itself—the relation of words to reality—comes to be seen as fluid and unanchored. Endlessly deferred, meaning retreats down the signifying chain, nor would any degree of linguistic precision arrest signification’s flux in such a way as to privilege any final referent. Not that the postmoderns become indifferent to their medium—on the contrary, these writers become almost obsessive over words. They take full advantage of the extraordinary range of English vocabulary, and well-educated native speakers encounter many an out of the way word for the first time as they read Nabokov, John Barth, Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy. . . . These writers’ attention to nuance, moreover, makes even Henry James look slipshod. But rather than think of words as perfectible instruments of representation, postmodern writers seek constantly to make language draw attention to itself as a performative and reflexive medium. (Cowart Tribe 4) Fascination with language appears to be a given, but Cowart draws a more impressive set of distinctions when he compares the uses the postmodernists make of history, in contrast to the uses many modernists found in applying their personal knowledge of history. History as authoritative, linked with formal categories of knowledge, has now given way to a different edifice that sometimes mocks human abilities: “The post-modernists recognize the essential arbitrariness or groundlessness of all such forms of authority.” In a rampant inclusiveness, those who consider themselves postmodernists may write their own histories (Ibid. 5) Cowart also champions the fact that hundreds of writers today can be considered postmodernist. He sees no litmus test that can even-handedly include a writer, of whatever generation, in the category. This critic finds three basic principles for assessing postmodernism: “the role of irony in turn-of-the-millennium writing, the challenge to the storyteller of metahistory’s ascendency and metanarrative’s decline, [and] the role of the artist under postmodernism’s dispensation” (Ibid. 25). As he fits these very general principles into his primary thesis, that a “generational” reading clarifies not only critiques of stages in the development of postmodernism but the

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evaluation of a world by specific writers as well, Cowart acknowledges again that the critic’s personal taste is a primary ingredient in any assessment. Literary creativity delights in fresh challenges and meets them, often as not, without throwing over its models. Which is not to say that young writers must be content with the blunted tools of secondhand language. Every new literary generation purifies the Pierian Spring in its own way. (Cowart Tribe 24) Another of Cowart’s aims in The Tribe of Pyn is to show how varied contemporary, but still postmodern, writing has become.The larger part of his study is an illustration of this inclusive approach, finding postmodern characteristics in what seem to be very different texts. Cowart reads a number of single works as he shows his readers how this personal determination may work. In successive chapters he discusses a number of important contemporary writers, most of them not usually labeled “postmodern”—Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Michael Dorris, Chuck Palahniuk, Ann Patchett—as well as writers whose origins have customarily been identified by recent critics as postmodern—Rachel Ingalls, Steve Erickson, Richard Powers, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan. Of the latter group, Ingalls published earliest, with her novel Mrs. Caliban, and is occasionally mentioned with the key postmodern novelists. Erickson, Powers, Danielewski, and Egan are usually considered writers from several later waves. With Egan’s most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, published in October of 2017, her work is the most current. In making his selections of authors and works featured in these lengthy essays, which comprise most of the book, Cowart assumes a voice that might have been usefully heard during earlier canon wars. He claims to be challenging the belief that postmodernism stemmed from the writing of men, white men. He notes with some pride that early essays in the book are about Alice Walker’s story “Everyday Use” and Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. As he explains in a brief paragraph, he welcomes the sense that postmodernism is inclusive: anyone writing from the margins—women, minorities, the colonized or formerly colonized—can find shelter under the postmodern umbrella. One appreciates the inclusivity, for otherwise, in its purely technical trappings, postmodernism can look suspiciously (the occasional Kathy Acker and Ishmael Reed notwithstanding) like another all-male and nearly all-white club. (Cowart Tribe 5)2 Cowart’s inclusion of both Walker and Naylor points to the inherent exclusionary definitions of the postmodern: both highly acclaimed African-American women writers, during the 1970s and 1980s exceeding Toni Morrison in critical reputation, Walker and Naylor were separated out by both gender and race. Also ghettoized by race were Charles Wright, Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, and others. Michael Dorris received the same kind of separation because of his Native

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American heritage. That these writers were omitted from discussions of the postmodern is not surprising; race and gender are the most evident kinds of difference to be considered. But in the case of postmodernism, with kinds of writing being fused into rare postmodern distinctions, perhaps a more allusive kind of difference pattern occurs. Just as Cowart opens his first list of early postmodern writers with the name Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., so a somewhat radical defense of science fiction and science fantasy has more recently come to be a part of the postmodern discussion. Another genre transformation that was prompted by considerations of the postmodern was the dramatic and inclusionary definition of memoir, autobiography, self-fiction, and even, more recently, biography. Critics have had much to say about race and gender, but perhaps a more telling transformation in American literature of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has been the recasting of genre. Never aimed at primarily adolescent readers, science fantasy originated with dystopic masterpieces such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 1888.There is no reason to discount the British heritage of this mode, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. Such a genre history is filled with names like Jules Verne and H. G.Wells (as well as Edgar Allan Poe), not to mention the Frank Reade series and such magazines as Amazing Stories, Argosy, Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, and Galaxy. More relevant to the mid-twentieth century science fiction writers (Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Lester Del Rey) would be the general emphasis on the futuristic employment of science and technology, in alien cultures, in space and time travel, in abnormal mental states and particularly in alternative existences. Particularly during the Second World War, the science fiction genre provided escape for its readers. Fantasy as well as techno-adventures made such authors as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and William Gibson important literary figures. These writers were not diminished by their working in the science fiction genre. In the critiques by both Larry McCaffery and Kathryn Hume, science fiction is considered a crucial means of breaking the stranglehold of “formal” literary cate­ go­r ies for popular reading—and popular readers. Both critics see the development of this genre as healthful, making the move to American interests more visible, drawing in current information about technology and science in ways that fulfilled reader interest as much as providing information. McCaffery contended that the genre was accurately reflecting the changes science had made to everyday life: “ The growth and maturity of science fiction in the United States was signaled in the 1960s and early 1970s by the appropriation of science fiction forms by ‘mainstream’ writers such as Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, 1969), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969) and others” (McCaffery, “Fictions” 1166). In Kathryn Hume’s view,Vonnegut should never be relegated to discussions of science fiction. He should instead be paired with Don DeLillo in the seriousness of their aims as writers and their superb understanding of American culture. Hume also insists that the work of Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy marked major turns in existing “feminist” fiction (Hume 80).

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The 1960s became the age of Vonnegut: Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were his ancestors, but from the time of Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, people assumed whatever kind of techno-fiction this was would endure.Vonnegut’s whimsical and satirical books (in 1959 The Sirens of Titan; in 1961 Mother Night with its complicated “double agent” Nazi characters; in 1963 Cat’s Cradle, more fantasy than science fiction;3 in 1965 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; and in 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade, a book that changed readers’ perceptions of war as well as of war fiction for the rest of that century and this become classics. Based partly on Vonnegut’s own experiences in Dresden, Germany, as he lived through the horrifying bombings and then was a prisoner of war, this novel became the key to the rest of his writing—much of it slighter, some of it bordering on the absurd, but all of it creating an oeuvre that ran parallel with much postmodern fiction during the 1960s and 1970s.4 For all Vonnegut’s consistent emphasis on humor, his vision of the contemporary world, the reality of the postwar existence in even the wealthiest of American locations, was unrelievedly sorrowful. He called The Sirens of Titan a “true story for the Nightmare Ages.” Everyone awaits a third great depression. Everyone recognizes that the United States has become “a nightmare of meaninglessness without end, [a place where people are] ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being.” Yet when he presents the mastery of science in Cat’s Cradle, with his expose of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, any pretense of “knowledge” becomes a deadly sham.With the character of Billy Pilgrim in SlaughterhouseFive,Vonnegut becomes the father of the next decades of American science fiction. He shares that rubric—reversing gender—with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy, 1968–1972, and her Hainish group before that.Then came The Left Hand of Darkness, in 1969. All her imaginative worlds provoked responses, readers compelled to relate to them through their own questioning beliefs. Devoting a chapter to Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, her 1985 novel that establishes the utopian world that could lead to a healthy twenty-first century, Tom LeClair notes that he sees this monumental book about the (fictional) Kesh as Le Guin’s answer to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, published a decade earlier. LeClair is one of the few contemporary critics to bring science fiction into discussions of the traditional postmodern novel. Based on the anthropological premises set forth in the gift psychology,5 which he sees as the premise for the worlds created here, Le Guin’s assemblage of materials from the Kesh culture illustrates the kind of systemic inclusion first illustrated by William Gass. The book’s mixture of nonverbal forms, music, and imagery comprises a truly anthropological museum; LeClair’s reading of it makes its relevance to the rest of the author’s work clear (LeClair Excess 204–36).6 No less significant than Le Guin’s is William Gibson’s contribution to this genre. Revolutionary in its impact, Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer (and the range of films that it prompted) started readers searching in widely varied directions. Where were the most interesting new worlds? Ironically, even as Gibson’s first novel won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the book drew on both futurism and the hard-boiled detective style. Case was as flinty a

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protagonist as any Hammett or Cain character had been. Near the end of the novel, readers find the title character, a boy “tired and sad and human” who reinforces the human quotient of Gibson’s range within science fiction.7 As Miller notes in his Understanding William Gibson, where he tends to downplay the obvious reasons for Gibson’s prominence, he emphasizes that this author “is often given the moniker ‘father of cyberpunk,’ the subgenre of science fiction (or sci-fi, or SF) that focuses on computer information systems, corporate control, and hyperurbanized spaces.” Miller’s definite preference is for the way Gibson influenced the next decades of science fiction. He notes, for example, the past cyberpunk generation has (like postmodernism) become selfconscious and aware of its own traits. Consequently it starts to play with these characteristics as Gibson himself does in his “Bridge Trilogy.” Many of these authors are the original cyberpunks themselves, such as Gibson and Sterling, but there is also a new breed of authors, such as Neal Stephenson, Jonathan Lethem, Cory Doctorow, Paolo Batigalupi, and Charles Stross. (Miller Understanding 1, 126) Whereas Cowart does not in this 2015 book write about Vonnegut, except to place him at the center of the movement, he opens the essay section of The Tribe of Pyn with a long critique of Rachel Ingalls, one of the few women mentioned in the early history of American postmodernism. In his “Fantasy and Reality in Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban,” Cowart both introduces the novel and lays claim to various reasons he sees Ingalls as useful to critics’ thinking about the movement.8 Inventive, allusive, and psychologically adept, Mrs. Caliban drew intertextual life from the reader’s understanding of the misshapen Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Unlike the positive Ariel, the figure that would seem more easily aligned with a woman character, Caliban was, consistently, trouble. It followed therefore that marrying Caliban would martyr any woman who made such a choice. What Cowart does in his essay is to locate Ingalls’s writing as a bridge between first- and second-generation postmodernists. He admires the allusiveness of the novella; he likes the creation of her “Caliban”—here titled “Larry the Monsterman”—and he sees her finesse with the elements of fiction as akin to what Octavia Butler achieved in her science fiction. Finding Ingalls reminiscent of southern American women’s writing, especially that of Flannery O’Connor, he is willing to grant the obvious humor of these characters. At several points he mentions both the book and the film of Beauty and the Beast—Disney elevated here to the seriousness of sometimes unconscious sexual power dynamics. It goes without saying that women’s experiences are frequently painful, but Ingalls creates sympathy rather than horror for the reader’s experience with Larry. Mrs. Caliban’s taking comfort from being able to care for this monster man is, much of the time, understandable. Ingalls puts this unappreciated woman into a life that offers some comforts but very little emotional support. Even though the author gives us a Dorothy who tries to find the beauties of life, gardening as she does with

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Mr. Mendoza (a character even less autonomous than Mrs. Caliban), both Dorothy and Mendoza can only reverence the power of nature as they cultivate it. In many ways, Larry comes to represent the natural world, the good of nature. For Dorothy, married to a man obsessed with the care of his car, Larry is whimsical, as well as in desperate need. For many reasons, Larry has recognized that he needs her. About the analogy with The Tempest, Cowart announces directly, “No Prospero, no Ariel, no God” (Cowart Tribe 34). He compares Dorothy’s desperation with that of Margaret Atwood’s later Offred (The Handmaid’s Tale appeared several years after Mrs. Caliban). Cowart straddles the line between the reality of a sea monster having escaped from an ocean observatory laboratory and Dorothy’s imagining everything about her monster man, including his existence. Cowart knows enough about a woman writer’s multilayered aims, however, to leave his critique open to various responses. He shows his reader, however, that to the repressed imagination, which Dorothy evinces, powerful men can be interchangeable: in some of Larry’s most forceful scenes, he is no more appealing than has been her husband. And for any character subjected to living conditions that make her truly subordinate, marriage becomes a crypt. There is little mystery about the closing graveyard scene for the reader who has understood Dorothy’s urge to become “Mrs. Caliban” all along. As Ingalls makes clear, friendship between women is also poisoned by the behavior of powerful men. Dorothy cannot trust her friend, who is also her spouse’s mistress, so her “fantasy” becomes her only option. Set in the configuration of newly emergent “feminist” novels such as Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1970), Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1974), Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977), and others, Mrs. Caliban found readers who saw all too well the miasma of unleashed male power—and the damages that were inevitable to people less powerful, especially those who were also sexually vulnerable. Calling Mrs. Caliban a “fantasy” kept it somehow approachable, free from the often-criticized politics that were said to motivate novels by angry women. Ingalls survived the harsh anti-feminist views of the 1970s when her novel appeared in 1982. By the time it was popular in the States, it seemed to be a separate mode, a product of imaginary forces, not gendered ones. Better described as postmodernist were the fictions being written by Kathy Acker, the New Yorker turned Californian who equipped herself thoroughly to call attention to her strident voicing of gothic humor. According to Chris Kraus, Acker’s biographer, she may have been the best read, and perhaps the most intellectual, of any of the postmodernists. Working as a sex-show entertainer in New York, she was a serious poet who studied all contemporary United States poetry as well as the fiction of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Her early novels (The Early Life of the Black Tarantula By the Black Tarantula and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec By Henri Toulouse Lautrec, both 1975) made use of oblique autobiography, but her more experimental writing came between 1981 and 1988: Hello, I’m Erica Jong; Blood and Guts in High School; Great Expectations; Don Quixote; and Empire of

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the Senseless. Even as Acker worked intricately to break all molds for postmodern, feminist, and ironic writing, she still found herself outside the range of useful reviews. As Larry McCaffery noted, Acker manipulated “the larger structures of narrative. . . [are] teasingly presented. . ., assembled and then demolished as plot elements dissolve or fail to cohere, characters divide, and other reader expectations are mocked”9 (McCaffery Columbia 1176). Critic Ellen Friedman interprets much that Acker does as a feminist strategy, so in that regard her efforts parallel those of Rachel Ingalls, but McCaffery sees the range of effects in Acker’s works as moving far beyond gender. Friedman likes particularly the way Acker usurps the male narratives of both Great Expectations and Don Quixote and praises her effective demolishing of the elements of plot, character, and storytelling in the process. She speaks about Acker’s “strategy of subversion,” as she shapes the bildungsroman to make use of materials outside formal culture, so that her characters operate outside of patriarchy. She agrees with McCaffery that Acker’s work is “profoundly political,” and that, had the writer lived longer, she would have come into the postmodern fame she deserved (Friedman in Trachtenberg 137–138).10 Kathy Acker was a poster child for the merging of genres that was implicit in the most experimental postmodern writing, and her work also illustrated the kinds of postmodern humor Lance Olsen early described, the basis being irony in its various manifestations. The motivation behind postmodern writers’ choices, according to Olsen, was bitterness and cynicism in the face of a world it perceives as undergoing physical and metaphysical erasure.The irony is acidic, biting. . . .The audience often senses a complexity and subtlety of tone, but because the postmodern creator manipulates a system of private instead of public norms, his or her final position remains uncertain. (Olsen Circus 18) The distance Acker’s readers may have felt existing between the author’s insights and their own abilities may have occurred because Acker fulfilled the various roles of the postmodern writer too well. Never public, her mélange of private sources could not easily be identified. Her conglomerates, unlike those William Carlos Williams created in the five books of his Paterson, were far from public. As Chapter 6 of this study will illustrate, one of the most dominant techniques postmodern writers employed was the merging of genres—whether they moved from several recognizable modes within a single fiction, or from the pastiche of one voice or another within poems, or broke with the fourth wall convention common to drama for incorporation of interior monologs: such changes were within the realm of necessary, and acceptable, improvisation. But to postmodern writers, eager to make change and edgy about their means of doing so, comparatively minor changes in technique were not adequate. As the writing of William H. Gass illustrated early, if he wanted to evoke images of the color blue, he could write

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an entire book—a sonata, if you will, or a series of prose poems absent formal connections—about that simple manifestation of color. (See Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, published elegantly by Boston’s David Godine in 1976.) Or consider the hiatus in Robert Coover’s writing of fiction when he left the political thrust of his biting humor, which showed so effectively in The Public Burning, to script his own fairy tales of modern life, as he did in both Briar Rose, 1996, and Ghost Town, A  Novel, 1998. Had Coover not known the heights of acceptance as one of the undisputed early postmodernists, finding publishers for these two short works would have been difficult. Grove brought out Briar Rose and Henry Holt did his Western; much of the difficulty Kathy Acker found in maintaining her life as writer was that she could not move beyond her work’s appearing from Grove Press. McCaffery gives a seminal reading of the postmodernists’ need to fuse genres, and to move one set of genre conventions into another mode entirely. He says, Creating texts that refuse to privilege one form of discourse over another— that in fact openly acknowledge the problematics of the text, textuality, objectivity, ideology, meaning, and representation—has important social and political implications, and these implications have been recognized by a number of recent authors to redefine the nature of politically “engaged” writing. Traditionalists naturally continue to insist that political issues find their best expression in straightforward, realistic formulae, with clearly defined problems presented by means of dramatic oppositions that are then restaged with dramatic (and didactic) effect. Certainly the most popular novelistic treatments of political themes remain traditional in approach, as is evident by the ongoing mass-market appeal of trash Capitol Hill potboilers and espionage thrillers—and of works of a considerably higher literary merit such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Richard Price’s Ladies Man (1978), Joyce Carol Oates’s Angel of Light (1981) . . . a close look at the best political works in recent years suggests that many writers interested in presenting political issues have concluded that social realist approaches are unduly limiting and simplistic (this view was undoubtedly reinforced by the brilliant examples of politics-cum-experimentalism in the works of Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, and Manuel Puig. . . . Since the mid-1970s an impressive variety of innovative political fiction has been published by such writers as: Robert Coover (The Public Burning [1977]), Walter Abish (Alphabetical Africa [1974] and How German Is It [1980]), Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School  ). (McCaffery Columbia 1175) To move from genre to genre, as the postmodernists did (and do), is seldom difficult; an established writer is writing for a coterie readership and knows that at least some reviews will be positive. Perhaps a more troublesome transition is the move from white writers to those of color, even though the humanities and the social science have been supporting this shift for more than half a century. Cowart

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makes this inclusionary move with his early chapters in The Tribe of Pyn on AfricanAmerican writers Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor, and on Michael Dorris as representative of Native American letters. For the past forty years of critique in American literature—beginning with the canon wars and the publication of such progressive anthologies as Paul Lauter’s Heath Anthology of American Literature, issues of race—or more broadly, of multicultural impact—have been staples of discussion. Why skin color other than white has proved to be such anathema for critics and publishers is a recurring interrogation. For all the acclaim that Ralph Ellison received with his 1952 novel Invisible Man, none of the publisher’s ads mentioned that the author was African American. For all of the good books published in Detroit with the small Broadside Press, under the expert tutelage of Dudley Randall—poetry collections by then-unknown Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Margaret Danner, and Arna Bontemps—the well-established Gwendolyn Brooks, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Maud Martha, gave up her commercial publishing contracts to move her 1968 poem collection, In the Mecca, to Randall’s press. For mainstream reviewers, however, none of these books, or their authors, mattered. Unfortunately, the United States has too many blotted pages of hostility to people of color, either native born or immigrant, to find such examples surprising.The image of America as a melting pot of races and ethnicities and religious convictions glistens right there beside the red, white, and blue of the national flag, but history shows that many perverse behaviors have been occasioned by the entry of people seen as “foreign.” Either these population groups have been considered too competitive, taking jobs away from residents already here; or too radical, their belief systems not amenable to change or to assimilation; or some suspicion exists that they may have come with agendas of destruction. Our national history makes no effort to conceal the murders of Chinese laborers who came to this country to build the transcontinental railroads, men forbidden to bring their families with them; or the citizens who had migrated from Japan who were incarcerated during World War II so that they could not become spies for their country of origin; or the thousands of immigrants from both the Middle East and Mexico who have been killed in the process of simply crossing borders into America. It is not a pleasant history, and in many ways the publishing industry appeared to be contradicting the events that television cameras too often recorded. There was an abundance of new presses interested in migrant stories; critical books chronicled the immigrant experience: Arte Publico, Thunder’s Mouth Press, Naiad Press, Maize,Third Woman, Aunt Lute Books, Firebrand, Inner City (Toronto), Shambala, Common Courage, Westminster, Crossing Press, Aquarian, Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, and others from the self-publishing groups and electronic-based avenues of communication. Such opportunities to publish do not, however, erase the fact of racial and gender difference that leads, often, to either avoidance or outright persecution of minority groups. Of all the minority groups in the United States, the largest and most literarily prolific is the African American (or the African or the South African or, as it was titled in the 1960s, the Black Arts group).11 That university students could minor or major in ethnic literature—-particularly that of African-American writers and

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philosophers—enhanced both the appeal and the knowledge (and the impetus to write literary criticism) of interested readers. According to Charles Johnson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Geneva Smitherman, Darwin Turner, and other critics, there were several hurdles to jump before the best African-American writing could reach mainstream readers. One of these was choice in the use of idiomatic language. An even more important avenue for educating non-African-American readers was the cultural import of the writer’s choices in anecdotes, plotlines, and character tropes. Gates uses the term “signifying” to suggest the latter. Gates’s discussion of the fiction and poetry of Ishmael Reed, a clearly postmodern writer in his uses of comedy, irony, exaggeration, and speed, events set in a panoply of richly suggestive meaning to make his case, is accurate and convincing. Few writers of the time so well illustrated the postmodern. Beginning in 1967 with The Freelance Pallbearers, Reed wrote compelling (and clearly postmodern) novels. In 1969, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down appeared, followed by Mumbo Jumbo in 1972 and Flight to Canada in 1976, and others. What Reed accomplished, according to Gates in The Signifying Monkey, is an accurate glossing of the concept of “signifying.” Reed shows his extensive knowledge about literary traditions, but he also is adept at using a scaffolding of stereotypes to puncture those traditions. Gates writes, In Reed’s work, parody and hidden polemic overlap. . . .The clearest evidence that Reed in Mumbo Jumbo is Signifyin(g) . . . is his use of the two autonomous voices . . . which Reed employs in the manner of and renders through foregrounding, to parody the two simultaneous stories of detective narrative, that of the present and that of the past, in a narrative flow that moves hurriedly from cause to effect. (Gates Signifying 215–16) Gates also admires Reed’s inclusion of many African-American texts, often subversively, into the pastiche that is his own narrative. He notes that “Reed’s fictions argue that the so-called black experience cannot be thought of as a fluid content to be poured into received and static containers” (Ibid. 218).12 For Cowart, merely rehearsing commentary about such writers as Reed and Major does not fulfill his aims in his 2015 book, that of introducing works by writers who may be familiar to mainstream readers but who write with differing emphases. Most of Cowart’s separate essays focus on writers who would be considered postmodernist. For example, in his essay on Alice Walker, “Colonized Tongue, Colonized Pen: Heritage and Deracination in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use,’ ” Cowart says that her story from her 1973 collection functions as critique [as well as mapping] literary filiation. Like Mrs. Caliban, Walker’s “Everyday Use” proves ironic in all its parts, but the tone is comedic, even though the story unfolds in the vast and troubled shadow of African American history. (Cowart Tribe 39)

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He focuses on the character Wangaroo’s escape from her down-home culture, her naming herself to further rupture those ties, and her devastating realization that the inheritance she really desires—the family quilts, patched with remnants of people’s lives in the most personal of ways—have been given to her modest sister. The whole, with all its contradictory aims, is treated with a sympathetic distance that belies what Wangaroo thinks are her aims. Carefully inscribed by Walker’s clarifying word choice, “Everyday Use” is a paradigmatic African-American statement about difficulty—the difficulty in choosing words that signify more than their literal meaning, the difficulty in not offending either mainstream or African-American readers, the difficulty of understanding that one’s roots may lie in a ghetto of poverty but that respecting the heritage that poverty has helped to create is necessary. Cowart recognizes that Walker’s aims in her frequently controversial The Color Purple, 1982, replicated these principles of choice in language. As she opened that novel with Celie’s sorrowful letter to God, expressing her dismay at the complicity her step father forced her into as he repeatedly raped her, Walker calculated the shock effects of Celie’s initial language: He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around.Then he grab hold my titties.Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it. But I don’t never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook. My mama she fuss at me an look at me. She happy, cause he good to her now. But too sick to last long. (Walker Purple 11) Shocking in its use of crude language, the novel opened with the rapist’s warning to Celie, “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” Placing the young teenager between her beloved mother and her beloved God, using both love objects as threats, the man who will never be denied his sexual satisfaction—mean as his language is—shows his power. When in the following line, Celie begins her last-resort letters, writing to a God who will never read them, we learn the facts: she is 14, her mother has just given birth and refuses to have sex, and, as the last line in Celie’s monolog tells us, her mother is about to die. Walker gives her reader all the “facts” she needs to know, condensed on a single page at the start of the farfrom-comic narrative of the girl who has nowhere to turn. Sexual power, gender power, physical power, financial power: the dilemma for the writer is how to present those abuses without writing a sociological treatise. Walker finds this epistolary way, just as Celie finds a bisexual way, and Nettie finds a geographical and literary way: The Color Purple is a marvel of economies, all pointing to the fulfillment of Celie’s wishes, set against the absorbing narrative of the ways she learns to live—but never to accept—her broken, anguished existence. The sorrows within The Color Purple almost submerge the reader: this book may

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be a postmodern fiction but its more apparent theme is child abuse, and finding comedy in that story is impossible. Walker relinquishes the parody she had learned to use throughout her short fiction; she disguises whatever irony existed in the conditions that warped Celie’s young life. Unalleviated pain cannot be treated with even the darkest comedy. As Thadious M. Davis contends, in her 2011 Southscapes, Alice Walker has throughout her career been the bringer of difficult truths. Her accomplishments go far beyond the technical prowess so many readers associate with postmodernism. Davis, rather, sees Walker as a “crossroads” writer, one who “examined gender and ideological formations under segregation,” always reminding readers of those extant horrors. One of Walker’s strategies, evident in The Color Purple, according to Davis, was “collapsing the distinctions between genres,13 destabilizing the hierarchy of high and low cultures, high and low art, and exploring the class dynamics” all in the hope of challenging the views of most readers. How these aims fit into Davis’s contention that Walker is a true crossroads writer is that she has used her inordinate influence to change the direction of American literature: “Her crossroads position is the rethinking of how black people in the South from her grandmother’s and mother’s generation to her own created and survived and how they had managed to do so” (Davis Southscapes 336–337). The same interface with language, culture, and class guides Cowart’s reading in the third of his essays, “Braid of Blood: Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.” Necessarily replacing African American with Native American, Cowart assumes here as well as in his Walker essay that his readers will be familiar with the problems of ethnic writers’ attempting to introduce and clarify cultural behaviors so that their works resonate, regardless of who reads them. Again, A Yellow Raft focuses on several women narrators, in this case grandmother and mother along with the young protagonist Ray (who was initially conceived to be a boy). Ancestry, and the failure of family, disparage the sense that having family makes life simple. Even as Dorris makes his reader understand those characteristics facing the Native American man—“unemployment, alcoholism, the fragmented families”—Cowart discounts this thematic import (Cowart Tribe 55).14 He places the Dorris novel within a broader context of all American letters, however, by insisting that tribal identification, or even Native American identification, is not the sociologist Dorris’ point. It is rather, in Cowart’s phrasing, looking deeply into today’s culture, a place in which returning home is less than possible, a place where “growing up in a world where the old instrumentalities for personal, familial, and cultural integration” no longer exists. Set against the “homing” stories, such as The Odyssey, that have guided so much of the world’s literature, Dorris’s refusal to accept that metaphor is chilling. His view remains as bleak as that familiar to contemporary writing, regardless of ethnicity, or mixed ethnicity, or the distances between what education is able to provide and human results allow (Ibid. 59). With his fifth essay, Cowart broadens the scope of his interrogation of not only themes but postmodern affinities. “Matriarchal Mythopoesis: Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day” takes the reader back to Walker’s aims, and also refashions ways of telling the

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varied stories of equally various women’s lives.The heart of Cowart’s analysis draws from a number of critical projects—among these, Karla F. Holloway’s 1992 study, Moorings and Metaphors—that designate a larger matriarchal world that calls for inclusion in any analysis of writing by black women. In Cowart’s assessment, Naylor’s novel “implies that humanity will achieve its redemption only by restoring the proper mythic/religious relations between the sexes.The larger vision here involves recognizing and re-embracing a mother-deity displaced, in remote antiquity, by a host of unhealthy patriarchal alternatives” (Cowart Tribe 65). Much of this critic’s reading, however, laces the Naylor novel to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so the literary progression—between strong women characters described in fiction by women, to the shape-shifting characterizations of women found in Naylor’s National Book Award-winning The Women of Brewster Place, to those women’s continuing histories in Naylor’s Linden Hills, to the assertion of the existence of the matriarchal goddess and her place in today’s universe—weakens.15 Cowart accurately describes the interrelatedness of some of Naylor’s characters— beginning with Brewster Place, occurring within Linden Hills, and eventually arriving to people Miranda Day’s sleepy island of Willow Springs. His charting of Naylor’s work is helpful but somewhat reductionary: the enthusiasm he felt for Alice Walker’s achievements does not stretch to his discussion of Naylor. It is as if Mama Day remained, for him, entirely fanciful. For readers in the late 1980s, however, at the height of the first feminist movement, matriarchy seemed plausible.16 Instead, and somewhat reluctantly, the reader of Cowart’s criticism is sent back to that three-page appendix of birth dates, as if to justify his choices for these somewhat random essays. Ingalls was born in 1940; Walker in 1944; Dorris in 1945; and Naylor in 1950. One might be lured into thinking that the ethnicity of his essays two through four was their link, but then Cowart’s fifth essay moves from any consideration of minority writing to focus on Steve Erickson’s work (Erickson was also born in 1950). Cowart titles his essay about this writer—long respected by fellow postmodernists, although not yet a household name—“The Jeffersonian Vision in Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X.” His methodology relies on the conventions of using back story, that of Thomas Jefferson’s fathering children both white and black. Cowart acknowledges that Erickson has also drawn on autobiography as well as generally comic juxtapositions of randomness, but his chief interest lies in the author’s narrativizing of historical story—in order to create this all-too-postmodern fusion of truth and fiction. Cowart seems to dislike the novel because of his opinion that fiction should do more than replicate fact. He also seems to dislike Erickson’s white slaver, Bascombe Wade, and finds him unappealing, especially in relation to the slave Sapphira. With his use of that name as a signal, Erickson points to Willa Cather’s late novel, the 1940 Sapphira and the Slave Girl—but in the Cather work, Sapphira was herself a white woman slave owner, a woman perhaps physically and emotionally drawn to her young African-American property. The ambivalence of the relationship in Cather’s novel opens a number of reading strategies for Erickson’s 1993 book.

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In 1992 Toni Morrison had written a series of three Harvard lectures, publishing those talks as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Among the American fictions she discusses are Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and the weakest of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, To Have and Have Not. The literary world was fascinated with Morrison’s firmly held convictions about the ways these two respected American writers avoided dealing with racial issues—or, perhaps, saw nothing wrong with using attitudes that “good” literature of their time would have recognized and condoned. Morrison’s opinions made readers aware of the arbitrariness of racial attitudes and, eventually, helped to modify the way readers dealt with racism in literature. About the Cather novel, Morrison pointed out that Nancy, the slave girl, was “an almost completely buried subject,” set against the historically accurate portrayal of “the power and license of the white slave mistress” (Morrison Playing 18–19). Her assessment of the way in which Cather’s plot turned varied immeasurably from the way the novel was usually read, if it was read at all. Morrison stated that the narrative was built around “the interdependent working of power, race, and sexuality in a white woman’s battle for coherence.” As the plot developed, other characters came to assume the voicelessness that Sapphira feared: Morrison spoke about the fact that, in most literature, women characters were usually “rendered voiceless, a cipher, a perfect victim.” Adding in these valences from both Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, the sensibility that Erickson attempted to create and convey spreads broadly through his quasi-historical reportage. Some of Cowart’s negativity about this particular novel may reflect his discomfort with what this younger author (one Cowart refers to as a “second-comer postmodern”) has written. He then complains that Erickson has become too involved in “an esthetic ripe for passage into mannerism” (Cowart Tribe 83). There is vehemence as well when Cowart talks about Erickson’s admiration for Thomas Pynchon, the writer he considers his mentor. Whereas Pynchon makes his reliance on historiography interesting, Cowart says that this Erickson novel is filled with “bad prose,” and becomes a “heavy-handed exercise in historical revisionism” (Ibid. 82, 85). Overt attention to method seldom escapes criticism, although this Erickson novel was, like most of his work, well-received.17 Judging from Erickson’s much acclaimed 2017 novel, Shadowbahn, his first in five years, he learned how to create “fiction” that took on the appearance of reality/or at least the fantastic phantasy of a reality-based compilation. Reviewers have made references to Dali and commented on the speed—and the inclusiveness—of the wild set of narratives. In Shadowbahn, Erickson uses as a fulcrum the United States’ reaction to terrorism: the Twin Towers appear as if in a mirage twenty years after their destruction in 2001, only this time their location is on the South Dakota prairie. Monumental as the destruction of New York’s materialistic markers has been, with not only monuments but annual mournings, memories of the horrific terrorist attack are indelibly burned in the minds of anyone who watched the attacks and the destruction—of buildings and of lives—on September 11. Erickson

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chooses as one narrator a nondescript truck driver, whose misunderstandings with his wife punctuate his daily existence (Will she text him? Should he phone her?). It is a suitable strategy: in the nothingness of historical event, billions of people are marked by the images of those crumbling New York buildings—and the thousands of deaths that resulted. Erickson weaves several stories and countless musical tracks within the fantasy experience: his primary characters, Parker and Zema, are traveling from Los Angeles to visit their mother in Michigan; their driving through time, trying to forget their childhoods, sets one of the pervasive tones: “In the middle of a nowhere so black that around them the fields vanish” (Shadowbahn 147), and it is there that Parker falls asleep, only for an instant, a marker for his guilt about being the older sibling, a marker that leads to the narrative voice’s fading entirely off the printed page. Alternating with this story proper are the intermittent and focused songs, each with separate headings and separate songs/prose poem rhythms. And on the ninetythird floor of the shadowy South Dakota building, Jesse Presley, Elvis’s stillborn twin, sometimes sings to the thousands of Americans making the pilgrimage to this appearing and disappearing edifice. In contrast, he sometimes seems haunted as he repeatedly hears the familiar voice of his twin. In contrast to this critic’s view of Erickson’s work, Cowart introduces his essay on Richard Powers by calling him Pynchon’s “more accomplished disciple.” In “Passionate Pathography: Narrative Pharmakon in Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering Soul ” (Cowart Tribe 90), Cowart demonstrates his acute ability to make sense of fragmentary narrative structures. His approach, however, is similar to what he undertook in discussing the Erickson work: how effectively this novelist has used his considerable knowledge about medical doctors, particularly those who operate on patients as a major part of their service to humanity—therefore the novel’s title. Cowart once again presents much information to help the reader interpret the fiction, seeing it as a kind of capstone to the many storytelling roles that Powers has already taken on. Judging from the work Powers accomplishes fifteen years later, as he publishes The Echo Maker in 2008,18 his involvement in the life of physicians was crucial to the mysterious story of Mark Schluter’s indecipherable accident. No one knows how the damage of the protagonist’s mind occurred; no one knows his story. The trajectory of his life leads only to questions that are never answered: Where are his friends? Why does his sister Karin exist in such isolation? Who is the kindly nurse who cares for him so diligently? Why is the world-famous doctor, Gerald Weber, so interested in Mark’s case, and what does his interest portend for his own weary and sometimes failing mind? Two years later, Powers published a kind of sequel to The Echo Maker. Generosity posited calm and predictable stability, replacing the previous layers of frantic questioning. Tonally appealing, Generosity gave the reader no mysterious characters except one, “blessed” with talent and happiness as he interacts with other students in a creative writing class. A test case for scientific scrutiny, this student is analyzed, discussed, shown in interactions, and generally dissected as if to discover the secret

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of his happy life as a creative person. The impression a reader takes from Powers’ paired novels here is that of technique subsumed into meaning. The hopeful conclusion to the searching through people’s minds lies in the modest resolutions of Powers’ Generosity. Cowart closes his book with four somewhat unexpected essays. The first two pieces are about Chuck Palahniuk’s and Ann Patchett’s novels, and a critic might quibble about their being considered postmodern at all. The second two essays are about the foremost “younger” postmodernists, as they are usually classified, Mark Z. Danielewski and Jennifer Egan. As if bridging several decades when interest in the postmodern had begun to diminish, Cowart’s organization here supplies writers who were born in the 1960s, 1962 and 1963 for Palahniuk and Patchett, 1962 and 1966 for Egan and Danielewski. Controversial as his fiction has been, Chuck Palahniuk is noted for his violent subject matter: few critics have assessed his technical choices or attempted to place him in a group of writers with similar aims, except the groups interested in sadism, masculinity, or sexuality. Cowart acknowledges this in his “Anger, Anguish, and Art: Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke.” In fact, Cowart says directly that he intends his essay to answer Palahniuk’s “critical disparagers.” (Cowart Tribe 123). Almost all the criticism extant on Palahniuk refers to his earlier Fight Club, and often pairs that work with similar texts from European writers. Considering Cowart’s choices here as he attempts to represent the fluidity and diversity of postmodernism, one is reminded of Ron Sukenik’s insistence late in the twentieth century that whereas the elements of fiction remain consistent, “most fiction is not ‘about’ anything except itself, that is, about the way we structure event through language, which is to say, finally, that it is about almost everything.”19 Ann Patchett, whose interesting work takes her into memoir and biography as well as fiction, has become a best-selling novelist (as her 2016 Commonwealth has recently shown). In her use of multiple narrative lines, technical proficiency has been considered less significant than “story.” Cowart here objects to her tendency to work from reality narratives, as she did in creating Bel Canto from the Peruvian episode in 1996, when the terrorists who provoked the incarceration of these innocents were eventually—after 126 days—defeated. Patchett’s paean to music and beauty moved with global significance, making her setting the crime within the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima more than a literal touch. Roxann Coss, the opera star, becomes the hero of the narrative. Patchett seamlessly draws together issues of class, education, music/opera, and political power. Cowart especially enjoys what he calls Patchett’s “artfully submerged feminism,” although in his close reading, he makes much of the use of woman as protagonist (Cowart Tribe 143). Commonwealth, Patchett’s recent novel, works differently. A large canvas of interacting family members offers a quantity of interrelationships, despite its being set in the Los Angeles of the 1960s. Reminiscent of John Updike’s Couples nearly half a century earlier, Commonwealth carefully plots the destruction of the two divorcing families (and their six children), giving the responsibility of conveying the family

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narrative to the character of Frannie, the child who is being baptized at the start of the book. As the saga of the Keatings and the Cousins unrolls, Patchett reveals the irony: that an older Frannie has told the family story to her writer-lover, Leon Posen, who writes this version of the Keating-Cousins story in a novel titled Commonwealth, a novel that wins the National Book Award. The family is, then, very publicly revealed, just as Patchett’s choice for her narrative makes use of large blocks of prose, heavily infused with speculations about ideas, and treated almost antiseptically. Commonwealth works specific details into blamelessness. It also asks its readers to avoid the traps of the personal: should Beverly Keating in her blonde beauty be blamed for the destruction of these families? As Patchett brings the roving text to its end, filled as it is with deaths accidental and chosen, the enormity of attempting to narrativize such a “commonwealth” strikes the reader. Although Patchett has here stayed within the United States borders rather than including exotic foreign locales, she makes clear that the family saga is a rich enough world for any book of stories.20 When Cowart turns to his assessment of Mark Z. Danielewski’s paradigmatic novel, The House of Leaves, he echoes the almost reverent tone of much of the criticism of that work. In his “The Sorrows of Y   oung Icarus: Mark Z. Danielew­ ski’s House of Leaves,” he draws parallels between this almost engulfing text and its early classical analogs. The novel of endless variety—art, music, drawings, paper changes, photos, song lyrics—is truly encyclopedic, and in the praises of readers who understand postmodernism, that adjective represents unqualified good. The House of Leaves has been compared with Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse; it has also been called “a labyrinth of typography” (Fordham “Katabasis” 45). Paul McCormick extends the relevance of this novel by describing the author’s use of all media. He says The House of Leaves “thoughtfully and audaciously engages with the American media environment. . . . The novel has been referred to as ‘work as assemblage,’ ‘a figure for the digital,’ ‘a networked novel’.” McCormick’s preferred term is “a cinematic novel” (McCormick “Cinema” 52). For Irmtraud Huber, the central, fantastic story at the book’s center makes The House of Leaves representative of some outer edge of the post-postmodern, or what she calls “Postmodernism in its nihilistic, solipsistic and destructive extreme.” She thinks the novel is “obviously and explicitly indebted to both postmodernist thought and esthetics [but] it suggests venues for thinking (and living) which continue to take postmodernist insights into account while searching out new communicative and communal connections and meanings” (Huber After 79). Cowart’s essay on Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad emphasizes that she is another exemplary postmodernist. “Thirteen Ways of Looking” is the opening title, but he offers fewer reasons than his title suggests. Cowart simply likes this novel. Whether he is as fond of Egan’s 2017 Manhattan Beach, a much more realistic approach to story, is of less relevance here. In the shift from Goon Squad to Manhattan Beach, Egan draws on a number of the same strategies: her development of character rivals successful patterning by most living novelists. Her persuasive incorporation of an immense amount of background and

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factual material (how ocean divers were trained during the early years of World War II; how the criminals operating in New York City evaded capture for years, decades; what the war milieu changed about gender behavior), a tactic that seems effortless but is dependent on what she terms “the reading I did for my research. My sources ranged from books so rare and technical that I couldn’t get them in physical form— Navy deep sea diving manuals from the 1940s, for example” (Egan “Open” 27). Amor Towles in his New York Times Book Review essay tied Egan’s use of sheer information to her writing a traditional novel, based on her three disparate but connected characters. He admires the immense quantity of information she provides about the lives of Anna, working on the naval pier; her father Eddie, following his life of crime in the city; and the high-placed Dexter Styles, who has entered the New York “400” through his marriage into a wealthy family. As Towles points out, Egan’s information is tied to the various class “professions” these people experience: their “culture” is artificial, buried under years of their work. While he makes the distinction that Manhattan Beach is more of a sea novel than a city one, and in that emphasis it maintains the promise of expansion and of health that the sea offers,21 Towles finds Egan’s competence in writing this kind of novel impressive (Towles Times 24).22 For a writer who is considered the bright star among today’s postmodernists, the praise for her work in a traditional sense might be bothersome. It was Egan’s most postmodern novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, that won for her the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Literary opinion is fickle, as all readers—and writers—know, and to have Manhattan Beach enter the New York Times Book Review listings at number three this past fall was itself a notable accomplishment. But Egan’s novel did not stay on the best-seller list. And as she noted in a brief comment to Kirkus, this novel represented her long-held desire to write “an old-fashioned adventure story.” She might have stopped with that comment, but she continued, “it’s really about parenthood. . . . I never thought I would write a book about that. I hope I disguised it well” (Egan Times 24). If critics needed a push to consider Anna in relation to her father, Eddie, Egan’s own critique might provide that impetus. In David Cowart’s admirable effort to find connections between today’s postmodern writers23 and their points of reference now many decades back, The Tribe of Pyn remains necessarily partial. Cowart does not present essays on all the American writers who might have been included; he does not labor with his rationale for including one writer or another. He presents a group of readings of works that may provide guidance for readers here in 2015 who remain intrigued by the still-evident influence of the essential postmodernists. As Cowart notes in the concluding pages of The Tribe of Pyn, speculating on an answer to the question that itself prompted the book, “What is the relationship between one artistic generation and another?” His first attempt to answer is anecdotal. Cowart notes that some younger writers expressed their admiration for Pynchon (Powers, Erickson), DeLillo (Franzen, Wallace), O’Connor (Walker), or Morrison (Naylor). Danielewski rewrites Nabokov without, he says, having read Pale Fire. Though all continue the

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subversion or reframing of modernist esthetics begun by writers as much as forty or fifty years older than themselves, one or two (Egan, Patchett) have contrived to think of the moderns (Proust, Eliot, Mann) as honored ancestors. (Cowart Tribe 193) Brian McHale provides an echo and an extension of these remarks. He acknowledges that our considerations of “postmodernism” are so fluid as to avoid any compromise. In fact, postmodernism is “too various for easy generalization.” Much of it, however, regardless of the time of composition, “involves spectacle, mixed media, and often weak or incidental narrative.” (McHale Cambridge 11). In a more literally concluding image from The Tribe of Pyn, one based on Cowart’s justified belief in what he has accomplished in this survey, he notes that I have come to think of postmodernism as a house of many mansions or, more simply, a great dwelling with many rooms yet to fill. From the vantage of the twenty-first century’s second decade, that is, one can advance the argument that younger writers have continued to ‘make it new’ without needing to dismantle the postmodern esthetic crafted by a parental generation. As they engage, resist, perpetuate, and redefine that esthetic, however, these second- and third-generation postmodernists compose a rainbow spectrum of literary possibility. (Cowart Tribe 199)

Notes 1 Cowart adds an appendix to this first chapter, in which over 160 of what he calls the postmoderns, or the tangential postmoderns—such as Norman Mailer—appear. Malcolm Cowley in his A Second Flowering aligned key modernists by birthdate half a century earlier, and Cowart does this with equally good effect. He later makes the point that the writing of John Barth, once considered revolutionary, has now become reading material for secondary school students (Cowart Tribe 27–29). 2 Somewhat ironically, Cowart has frequently, in his opening essay, listed the key postmodernists: “Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy” (p. 1); “Barth,Vonnegut, Pynchon” (p. 8); “Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy” (p. 9); “Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, Oates, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy” (p. 11); “Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, McCarthy” (p. 20). 3 Vonnegut’s most searing depiction of intelligence turned against children’s development, Cat’s Cradle described the way Dr. Felix Hoenikker treated his children as though they were disposable—privileging the interests of science over all human well-being. 4 As the publication of his 2017 Complete Stories proves, Vonnegut was trying to use the Dresden horror in various ways, often in fiction about time travel. The destruction that was war was never an easy topic, and his inventiveness, which led him toward sci-fi, became a plausible means of assessing the tragedy that decimated so much of the world. 5 See Hyde’s The Gift, a philosophical approach to social organization based on “participation and reciprocity” and a true valuing of human potential. LeClair calls Always Coming Home “the handbook of the next century” (LeClair Excess 208). 6 The contributions of Joanne Russ, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler deserve mention, but the initial impact of Vonnegut (and Asimov and Bradbury), along with Le Guin,

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provided the foundations for science fiction and science fantasy among United States readers and writers. See Miller Exploring. 7 Gibson’s 1987 Count Zero repeated this pattern as it took science fiction in yet another direction. Leaving behind the typical reliance on pure science, Gibson’s works gave readers “noir urban realism,” a “near future megalopolis,” and the “hallucinatory simulation of virtual space” (O’Donnell American 116). 8 The background he provides includes the fact that Ingalls lived much of her adult life in England. Though the 1982 Mrs. Caliban had sold very few copies in the States, the book was chosen by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the twenty greatest American novels since world War II. The British attention brought late reviews in the Atlantic and the New York Times Book Review, complete with reader interest. 9 McCaffery describes the way Acker relied on assemblage, in nearly all her fictions, as combining “fiction, myth, autobiography. . ., pornography, drawings, literary criticism, . . . and dozens of unacknowledged plagiarized texts.”The latter, along with what some readers considered pornography, unsettled readers. Her pastiche of parts was meant to reveal the author’s self. Her method proved consistently difficult (McCaffery Columbia 1174). 10 Brian McHale chooses to emphasize what Acker demonstrates in her 1988 Empire of the Senseless, which he sees as an appropriation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in what he terms “a crossing of the postmodern avant-garde and popular culture. Rewriting Gibson, she deletes some (but not all) of his original techno-speak, while interpolating oddly irrelevant details of her own” (McHale Cambridge 90). Now that the biography of Acker has appeared, perhaps those details will seem less odd—and less irrelevant. 11 Categorizing writers as African American might have been done during the brief period of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s, but the recapitulation of “literature” into entirely white hands reoccurred during the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, and even the 1960s. It was as if the political action of the 1960s was somehow divorced from the skin color of its most vocal writers. Somewhere in the melee of “politics,” the writing of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and others faced a readership that understood more about its themes than they previously had. 12 Space does not allow discussing Clarence Major, one of the most sophisticated AfricanAmerican writers, known for his theoretical work as well as his novels, especially the postmodern Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Emergency Exit (1979), Such Was the Season (1989), and many of his short stories. 13 Within The Color Purple, Walker uses poems, the prose poem, the sociologically interpretive essay, and the “scene” from theatrical productions. She draws on both objective points of view and subjective. She gives her reader numerous, distinctive characters. The novel is a carefully worked kaleidoscope of fictional elements. 14 If this were the primary theme, James Welch’s 1974 novel Winter in the Blood would probably make a more emphatic impression on readers. 15 As we have seen, the 1980s began with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and it was on its way to ending with Naylor’s Mama Day in 1987. But during those key years, criticism became confused. It left off reading the rich African-American novels that United States publishers were bringing to critics’ attention, and it belatedly began to notice the everprogressing fiction of Toni Morrison, who had been publishing her novels since The Bluest Eye in 1970; for this account, see Chapter Five of this study. The pairing of Naylor’s Mama Day with Morrison’s Beloved, published just months apart, changed the trajectory of critical opinion about the writing of African-American women writers. 16 One of the most thorough discussions of Naylor’s Mama Day occurs in Madhu Dubey’s book, Signs and Cities, Black Literary Postmodernism. By placing Naylor within peers, and by combining her discussion of Mama Day with that about Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Dubey brings a quantity of new insight to the work(s). 17 It will be interesting to see how Amy Bloom’s novel, White Houses (2018), fares. Based on the lesbian affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena (“Hick”) Hickok, the novel has received uniformly good early reviews.

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18 Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, The Echo Maker was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. 19 Sukenik is here quoted by Patrick O’Donnell in his 2012 The American Novel Now 108. O’Donnell has long argued with criticism that appears to be too easy and, at base, uninformed. If going back to the originating principles of postmodernism can clarify, it is a worthwhile strategy. 20 Theophilus Savvas contends that the recent interest in the family chronicle may stem from the combination of the postmodern novel with the historical novel, and one thinks of Jonathan Franzen’s work as an example. He adds that some readers appear to have lost interest in postmodernism itself (Savvas Past 156). 21 Catalina Neculai’s Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature might provide useful avenues of reading Manhattan Beach. 22 He also suggests that Egan builds on ancient genres, that of the power of secrets as in Oedipus Rex, and of the inevitability of the separate characters coming together again, as Anna has long projected in her attraction for Dexter (Towles Times 1). 23 One must acknowledge the temper of the times, when many critics asked respond that “postmodernism is dead,” or so countless blogs as well as more formal essays conjecture. What may be dead in this critical enterprise is critical consensus.

Suggested Further Reading Cowart, David. The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2015. Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes, Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. McHale, Brian, editor. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Miller, Gerald Alva, Jr. Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

5 MORRISON, DOCTOROW, KINGSTON, AND CHABON

In this chapter I will continue David Cowart’s scheme (tracing chronological and generational influences) with the occasional wry additions of Brian McHale and, more recently, Amy Hungerford. I will feature, to begin, the work of two significant American women writers—Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston—both of them ghettoized from the beginning of their writing careers, I believe, because of their skin color. From the time of Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970 by a press that was ranked considerably lower than Random House, the publisher for whom Morrison herself worked, she was treated as something of a novelty writer. If The Bluest Eye was reviewed at all, it was considered “modernist” because of its difficult and mixed styles. In the shade of Maya Angelou’s best-selling autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, another 1970s publication, The Bluest Eye seemed to be of little interest. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, written by another African-American author with no name recognition, was well publicized by Random House. It was translated into many languages; it became a poignant curiosity—the story of an abused black daughter, so frightened by the act of sexual molestation (and by her abuser’s being killed right after she has testified against him in court), that she did not speak for seven years—except to her beloved brother, who translated her life to the world. It was a gripping story, especially since the child gone mute was this author. Add in some of Angelou’s recognition as a singer and a dancer—a stage celebrity of sorts— and readers looked eagerly for her story. There were almost no women’s autobiographies of interest to contemporary readers—without much planning, Angelou filled a gap that readers hungered to have filled. The story was uplifting; it gave those readers an optimistic satisfaction— that the grandmother of the family, dedicated, devoted to God and His ways, protective of her grandchildren, could succeed in saving them from white persecution. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became a staple of college and secondary school

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courses: it was taught and taught and taught. Nearly fifty years after its first publication, without ever having been out of print, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is still taught.1 For Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, however, only a limited readership existed. Ironically, the plot was similar: Pecola Breedlove was another abused child, but this time the predator was her biological father. There was no larger-than-life grandmother imbued with a firm belief system; there was no Southern culture filled with racist predators. Instead, Morrison drew from her own childhood, and so the narrative was set in northern Ohio. Ohio? What did a reader know about the upper Midwest? What kinds of patterns did that location suggest? In this and in other matters, readers had no immediate point of entry into the story. Because they had no means of judging the authenticity of Pecola Breedlove’s narrative, they remained outside it. The Bluest Eye was thought to be just plain “difficult.” Readers were also put off by Pecola’s name, by the oddly configured characters as they appeared in nonlinear sequences (for instance, Soaphead Church in his clearly psychopathic pursuits; or even the meanly superior Maureen Peale; or particularly the mother of the boy Pecola would like to have for a playmate).2 Sorting out not only characters but events made The Bluest Eye something of a conundrum, a puzzle that was only compounded by the book’s title.3 Morrison in The Bluest Eye chose to have Pecola’s story (much of it) told by Frieda and Claudia MacTeer, young girls whose family is conventionally stable— maintaining their moral values even in poverty, singing their way through trouble, making jokes that others can enjoy. But because the novel begins with the MacTeers, the shift to the Breedlove family’s classic dysfunction is another stumbling block for readers. The disparate pieces of this novel occur with unexpected speed. Set against the linearity of Angelou’s life story in her autobiography, The Bluest Eye, confusing as it seemed, might well remain unread. Just as names and events seemingly peripheral to the Pecola plot strike the reader as unreal, the book’s later chapters, which trace Pecola’s descent into madness after her father’s rape, and her life during the pregnancy that results from that violation, surprise the reader who still expects linearity and, above all, being given markers for predictable action. In 1973, Morrison took her second novel, the story of the outrageously unpredictable African-American woman Sula, to Random House; from that time on, Morrison was herself a Random House author (as well as being an editor there). In 1974, Random House published Maya Angelou’s second volume of what would be her six-book autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. Again, while readers found Morrison’s Sula filled with technical difficulties (though not so complicated in plot and strategy as The Bluest Eye had been), Angelou’s second autobiography was open for any interested reader: direct storytelling, interesting characters, the message of endurance through uplift, and the frame of Angelou’s life in crisis—several times. As riveting as the story of her giving birth (of her own choice) and then having to support herself and her son, Guy; changing every aspect of her life to live in New York and marrying the Greek man from whom she takes her name—Tosh Angelos.

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Reviewers were not uniformly pleased with this second book—Angelou’s use of street language bothered several, as did the comic treatment she gave to her time working in a house of prostitution. Whereas the presence of grandmother Annie Henderson might have ameliorated these effects, this volume includes only one episode when Angelou returns to Stamps, Arkansas, where she offends members of the white community and then is spirited out of the area—with her baby, Guy—at her grandmother’s arranging. More varied in tone than was the first book, Gather Together in My Name is darker, and the narrative through-line is Angelou’s need to earn a living. This volume made clear that being a single mother was in no way satisfying—and even her three-year marriage to Tosh, which in some states would have been illegal because miscegenation was not allowed, provided little relief from the tone of desperation. What made Angelou’s autobiographies successful was her ability to set up a single narrative and to follow it, clearly, with the intention of including her readers. Toni Morrison was not aiming for mystery, but as she used what were postmodernist tactics,4 she made her stories intrinsically difficult. Some of Morrison’s novel effects stemmed from her intricate writing processes. She had handwritten The Bluest Eye through seven versions, at one point adding the MacTeer family segments, and the density of her metaphoric prose added in various passages of dialog (some without speakers identified), made each scene partly a process of answering readers’ questions. By the time she was composing Sula, she had learned to write more directly, but she was a highly educated writer (with one degree as an English major from Howard University and her master’s degree from Cornell University, where she wrote her graduate thesis on William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! and Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway). She knew what modernism was, and she also knew what postmodernism was: she was attempting to write her own fiction, but she had never composed her own books before. No reviewer of any of these four books connected either Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison with postmodernism. Instead, critics who studied contemporary literature found themselves scrutinizing one kind of fiction, not the whole range of published novels. For John Johnston, for example, commenting on what he considered the excellent postmodern novels published in the early 1970s, his listing includes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge, William Gaddis’s JR, and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, books published in 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976. The 1970s etched postmodern concerns into readers’ awareness; any work that was declared unsuitable for that categorization (in Morrison’s and Angelou’s cases, for reasons of race and gender) did not exist in the general critical consciousness. As Johnston declares about his choices here, “Formally, all are largescaled and excessive encyclopedic narratives, teeming with the kind of information that puts demanding strains on the reader while hardly meeting conventional expectations about what novels should do and what pleasures they should provide” ( Johnston “Postmodern” 169). While this comment would not apply to Angelou’s autobiographies, it would eventually become relevant to Morrison’s novels.

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In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston published her first book, a fusion of the genres of fiction and memoir that astonished the reading world. Another woman with no name recognition, Kingston was Asian American: she had a very small audience for this blend of history and present-day feminist understanding. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, was reviewed everywhere; it was translated into many languages. Fitting this 1976 book at the end of Johnston’s quartet of significant postmodern books listed previously created an irony obvious today. For all that critics might declare that some writers were beneath notice, that some writers did not fit into established categories—nor would they ever fit, Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Non-Fiction for this first book (and in 1977 the book was also awarded the Anisfeld-Wolf Race Relations Award). The publication of Kingston’s Woman Warrior may also in some respects have been one beginning for an “ethnic” American writers category—again, if writers in such a group did not draw on postmodern techniques, would their writing be of any interest to the readers and critics who mattered? As a corollary to that question, if no critic seriously assessed the work, would anyone know how postmodern it wasn’t—or was? The prolegomenon this study has been suggesting looks different from John Johnston’s listing. It goes like this: in summary, in 1970, Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye and Maya Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 1973 Morrison published her second novel, Sula. In 1974, Angelou published her second volume of autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, followed in 1976 by her third volume, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas. In that same year, Maxine Hong Kingston published Woman Warrior. In 1977, when Toni Morrison published her third novel, Song of Solomon, she too would have been ignored except that in this work, written for her father, she had drawn strong male characters. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, by doing so, placed Toni Morrison within view of many influential mainstream critics. Perhaps Morrison had not been doing enough to publicize her own writing. As an editor at Random House, she recalls now that she felt that her job of finding African-American authors to publish was a “mission.” Her aim was to increase the world’s knowledge of black writers. As she told Junot Diaz in her now-famous interview for the New York Public Library (aired December 12, 2013), finding new black authors, urging Random House to publish them, was “extremely important to me.” She continued that she did not deal with agents: “You had to get out there and look.” She found Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Toni Cade, Gayl Jones, Huey Newton, and others. She found Muhammad Ali. In Morrison’s view, mainstream American publishers were interested largely in conservative African-American writers whose literature was “restrained.” Morrison, however, wanted to find the variety that she knew would be representative, as well as comic. She particularly wanted to see the “fierce black women” that she knew existed, and which she had created in her characters Sula, Pilate, and others. And she continued this mission for the nineteen years she worked for Random House (Diaz Public Library 2013).

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Another dimension of characterizing African-American narratives, according to Morrison, was an accurate use of their language. As she said in the Nellie McKay interview, describing the ways in which language is crucial to her characterization of black speakers: Black people have a story, and that story has to be heard.There was an articulate literature before there was print. . . . What you hear is what you remember. That oral quality is deliberate. It is not unique to my writing; but it is a deliberate sound that I try to catch.The way black people talk is not so much the use of non-standard grammar as it is the manipulation of metaphor. The fact is that the stories look as though they come from people who are not even authors. . . . They are just told—meanderingly—as though they were going in several directions at the same time. (Morrison Conversations 152) Morrison repeats this narrative in her 2017 Harvard lectures, The Origin of Others, where she approaches the condition of being “other” or “outsider” from various perspectives. As she had in her 2012 essay “Home,” living in a raced society, knowing that she was a black person, made her cultivate the only kind of home she found comfortable. The significant link—to Morrison—between herself as writer and the world was her acknowledgment of race. She writes, “I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter.” Her consciousness of all the attitudes about race makes her insist that this concern creates, for her, a home. Making race into a home “domesticates the racial project” and allows Morrison the writer to align herself with people she loves (Morrison “Home” 3–4). She repeats this insistence in her lectures, along with the conventional writerly accomplishment of succeeding as she builds her novels from various elements of race consciousness. She returns often to discuss Paradise, her 1998 novel, where all-black Oklahoma towns excluded mixed-race or white people and were prompted to go so far as to kill whoever did not meet their colorist requirements. “They shoot the white girl first,” the novel opens, and then, like her story “Recitatif,” no other mention of skin color occurs throughout the lengthy novel.5 Speaking about the writing of Paradise decades after its inception, Morrison shows the careful ingenuity that permeates each of her novels. When she gave a more than usually direct answer about matters of craft, speaking in a single interview, she set forth a number of principles that clearly governed her writing— particularly in her novels from Beloved to Home. With Beloved she had found an entry into the whole of African-American history, especially women’s history, and she would mine that history for the rest of her writing career. The plot, the lean plot, is information. This is what happened. But the meaning of a novel is in the structure. . . . We learn something today that clarifies something ten years ago. Or we think the most momentous thing that ever happened was something that happened yesterday or twenty years ago only to

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learn that it was part really of something else, or that it wasn’t momentous at all. So that the way in which the mind takes in the varieties of the experiences of life and other people, has to be reassembled for its meaning and that’s where the structure, at least what I work very hard at, is the sort of deep structure, what is there underneath this activity. And then you see it from another person’s point of view. not just one character but another’s, and how and when that information becomes available to the reader seems to me to be the real adventure. (Morrison Conversations II 218–19) This gradual and unplanned revelation, dependent upon not only the author’s choices but those of the reader as well, establishes the role of the human unconscious, in writing and all occasions for art. Morrison talks about her reverence for William Faulkner in this same connection. “William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect. With Faulkner there was always something to surface. . . .With Faulkner one was never indifferent” (Morrison Conversations II 25–26; italics mine). If a critic so desired, Morrison’s novels could be diagrammed so that readers would understand where information was provided and where it was withheld. She calls the holistic effect of a novel its “structure,” but the rudimentary quality of that word does not convey the immensely complicated tactical strategies Morrison creates. She came to the importance of the revealing and withholding particulars in Beloved when she was puzzled by the child-murdering Sethe. She recently wrote about her fascination with this theme, again in The Origin of Others. There she discusses working very generally from the Margaret Garner story, omitting the known details. How did the murdering mother’s mother-in-law react to this killing? How did the other children? How did the baby herself? Imaginatively, Morrison gave the reader the vivid personae of Baby Suggs and Denver, whose parts in Beloved are sometimes overlooked. The crux of the novel, as Morrison phrased it, was “the understandable versus the savage act of child murder.” Rather than copying the facts of the Garner case, Morrison explained, I gave her one surviving child, the birth of whom was aided by a white girl, a runaway slave herself, whose sympathy was based on gender, not race. I saw Sethe, the name I gave the mother, escaping alone. I inserted a speaking, thinking dead child whose impact—and appearance and disappearance— could operate as slavery’s gothic damage, and I gave the mother-in-law (Baby Suggs) a pivotal role in enduring slavery as an unchurched, self-chosen preacher. And I hoped to explain her reluctance to condemn her daughterin-law by her faith and her commitment to love in her sermon. (Morrison Origin 84–86) After several more paragraphs of explanation, Morrison states that she made the ending hopeful (which Margaret Garner’s life, following her trial for killing

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her child, was not) by enhancing the love Sethe continued to experience from Paul D, here returned from his hiding out after learning of the enormity of Sethe’s act. When Sethe laments to him about her loss of Beloved that “ ‘She was my best thing,’ ” Paul D. corrects her thinking, telling her no, “ ‘You are your best thing.’ ” “She questions it. ‘Me? Me?’ She is not certain but at least the idea interests her. So there is the possibility of union, of peace, of having no need for regret” (Ibid. 86). Morrison feels so strongly about the murder of the child that she adds, ameliorating the hopefulness the reader might want to cherish, “That ending, of course, was not the final word.That would have to belong to the Other, the prime motivator, the reason for the novel’s existence, Beloved herself.” Hundreds of readings of Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel exist; as many sessions at professional conferences and teach-ins have been devoted to this beautifully conceived and written novel. Beloved is probably the reason for Morrison’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The creating of genuine sympathy for Sethe’s heinous act and for the tormented mother-murderer herself was Morrison’s great achievement to that time. Finding a jarringly deep, complex structure able to encompass the convoluted “meanings” of a slave woman’s life, a loving slave woman’s life, Morrison made our various human understandings of the act of Sethe’s murder surface for us. Beloved gives readers the knowledge and the reasons for that knowledge, with some equivocation but, mostly, with certainty. Morrison continued to commit herself and her talents to the creation of alltoo-human characters, caught in one or another worldly dilemma for which there were few answers—Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.With the latter 2015 novel, dedicated “For You,” Morrison continues the exploration she had achieved so perfectly in her 2011 Home, the story of siblings, of family memories, of women tortured by medical and psychological amateurs in the same ways military men were destroyed by what war forced them to do and, accordingly, to become. With these smaller casts of characters, in both Home and God Help the Child, some of the process of surfacing itself—no matter how bleak the hidden memories appear to be—becomes both plot and theme. God Help the Child fuses Morrison’s strongly felt views on colorism, race, and womanliness—or the lack thereof—into a narrative that hinges on the black, black woman called Bride. Other women, generations of women, appear in this novel, shorter than Morrison’s usual fictions, but its two-part resolution ends with Bride’s telling Booker she is pregnant with his child. He joins hands with her and tells her that it will be “our” child. But the last two pages revert to the monolog spoken by Bride’s mother, Sweetness, whose benediction is less than a curse but more than a questioning silence. It is Sweetness who, silently and in answer to her note, tells Bride (whom she still calls by her birth name Lula Ann): “Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.//Good luck and God help the child” (Morrison Child 178).6 It took only a few years after Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Beloved that mainstream critics began reading her work seriously.7 In 1992 Tony Hilfer linked Morrison with Donald Barthelme, terming them postmodernists and

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predicting great endurance for their work. That same year Brenda K. Marshall’s book, Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory, appeared from Routledge; she devoted a great deal of space to Morrison’s fiction. She introduced her premise by stating that “postmodernism owes a great deal to African American and feminist theory and practice.” She describes what she calls “a refocusing of history,” and in her chapter on Morrison’s Beloved, she terms that novel “a critique of traditional history.” In one of her illustrations, she notes that the message is of a past, distilled through an African language Sethe knew, knows, cannot remember, but rememories that Sethe’s mother threw away. . . . In Beloved the reclaiming of the self and of history are the same. But the self is not an individual, love, self. It is part of a community. (Marshall Teaching 191) By the time of Morrison’s winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, hundreds of essays and as many books were appearing about her esthetics and her fiction. Critics other than Morrison critics were also “explaining” her work, as did Katrin Amian in her 2008 study, Rethinking Postmodernism. The subtitle to that book listed “Thomas Pynchon,Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer.”8 Born as was Morrison in 1931, E. L. Doctorow similarly worked first in publishing. As an editor at Dial, he was responsible for—among other books—a series of studies on what was then called “popular culture,” among them Russel B. Nye’s The Unembarrassed Muse:The Popular Arts in America. Also like Morrison, Doctorow kept working in publishing, even after his first novel appeared. In 1960 he published his experimental Western, Welcome to Hard Times. But it was his 1971 The Book of Daniel, his third book, a fiction based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executions—deaths that had become symbolic of American injustice—that brought him nearly as much fame as did his Ragtime in 1975. Following the political successes of the American 1960s, fiction that unearthed events based on real life had started to shape a remarkably effective subgroup. A few years after The Book of Daniel, Robert Coover created his macabre and encyclopedic The Public Burning, which became a staple of postmodernism (see Chapter 2). What Doctorow achieved was far from comedy, however, and his intention was borne out by his innovative structure. By having the son of the Rosenbergs serve as primary narrator, Doctorow gave the execution of Daniel’s parents the solemnity that rocked the literary world. The Book of Daniel took its readers beyond actual events, though it relied on Doctorow’s interpretation of history. His method illustrated well what Huber was later to call his investment in “the power of storytelling while being aware of an undecidability” of that esthetic (Huber After 258). Doctorow’s writing was not postmodern in any oppositional sense: it rather took the most humane strains of story and wove them into what Brian McHale called, after Hutcheon and Jameson, historiographic metafiction (McHale Cambridge 76).9 In Savvas’s readings of Doctorow, he emphasizes the sheer skill and the author’s

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foundational belief that narrative is all-important, that a factual basis for any writing is usurped by whatever the author wants to do with that basis. Equating what Doctorow does, particularly in The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and perhaps Loon Lake, with postmodern techniques, as Savvas does, explains the ease with which Doctorow became not only accepted by the critical world but acclaimed. Within what appeared to be historical postmodern fictions, however, Doctorow always created levels of irony. Nothing about Daniel’s story in his book was sentimental, and some critics saw as well that nothing about his telling was strictly factual. Compounded through stretches of his own disbelief, Daniel’s narrative was more angry than sad. Nor was it sentimental. And what did readers make of his creation of three different endings for the story, the story that was, in fact, the story of his life? The same qualifications apply as well to what Doctorow achieved in Ragtime. Even his choice to emphasize music put critics on a new kind of guard: how different was this novel from The Book of Daniel? More to the point, WHY was Ragtime shaped in its encyclopedic way, kept from solidifying into “story,” and filled with intervals of representations of not only ragtime but blues more generally.Was Coalhouse Walker, Jr., THE Coalhouse Walker? Linda Hutcheon emphasizes the uses of “character” in her consideration of this kind of fiction. Here she defends writers such as Doctorow from the charges that they create “types”: it is clear that the protagonists of historiographic metafiction are anything but types; they are the ex-centrics, the marginalized, the peripheral figures of fictional history—the Coalhouse Walkers (in Ragtime). . . . Even the historical personages take on different, particularized, and ultimately ex-centric status: Doctor Copernicus (in the novel of the same name), Houdini (in Ragtime), Richard Nixon (in The Public Burning).10 Both Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson chose to write extensive commentaries on Doctorow’s work during the mid-1970s, making Ragtime an apparently perfect illustration of postmodernism.11 (As Savvas critiques Jameson’s approach, he finds adding to it a necessity. Both critics use the term bricolage, but other observers point out that the methodology was not that of John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy from the 1930s; it was rather that of the German author Heinrich von Kleist.) What Doctorow aimed for in Ragtime was a sense of characters in motion, flatly described, living an almost emotionless existence. No readers described his method as the vaunted objectivity that T. S. Eliot favored, or as an impartial and unsystematic catalog: it was a kind of hands-off pastiche that, sometimes literally, marched across page after page. Doctorow worked to create a chronicle; he used techniques that reminded readers of reportage, popular during the 1930s and into World War II.12 Savvas moves from the iconic place that Ragtime occupied within considerations of postmodernism to Doctorow’s 2005 novel The March, ostensibly one of the most

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“historical” of his presentations.13 In this account of General William Tecumseh Sherman, Union general, making his famed march to the sea, Doctorow accomplishes shifts in narrative points of view as well as alternations of active scenes with quiet ones. In fact Savvas emphasizes that The March does not behave as if it were intended to be a war novel (Savvas Past 147). What Doctorow does here is quite different from what he had achieved in his earlier works; The March seemed to prefigure his 2009 novel, Homer & Langley, a New York narrative in which the action seems, at points, to literally stop. Doctorow focuses relentlessly on the lives of the Collyer brothers, one blind, the other driven into madness by his World War I experiences. Sons of a wealthy New York family, the brothers live fragile lives in their macabre city house, stuffed with ancient magazines and papers, and the memorabilia of decades, while they supposedly gather information for what they conceive as being a timeless news vehicle, a project that never materializes. Countless scholars have written studies of Doctorow’s oeuvre; soon after his death in 2015 a new biography appeared. His place in the canon of postmodernism, for all the variations he showed in his fiction, some of which were inexplicable, would appear to be unquestioned. Morrison and Doctorow were born in 1931; Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940.Yet when her first book, The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, was published in 1976, the work won prizes, was translated into countless languages, and opened entire fields of both Asian-American literature and the more generally titled “ethnic” literature. Few women writers have had such an impact on the culture of American letters. As Julia H. Lee recently asked, How do we account for the popularity of this book, published by a thenunknown, first-time author of Chinese descent? First of all, the book is compellingly and beautifully written. In the five connected chapters, Kingston movingly portrays what it means to grow up the daughter of Chinese parents in a Chinatown neighborhood that seems detached from the China of her family’s past and the America of her own present. Moments of conjecture and narratives of fantasy follow without transition or comment passages that are grounded in the mundane life of a small child growing up in an ethnic enclave.The narrator’s disjointed accounts of family tragedies are interspersed with sly moments of humor and sarcasm as well as interludes of poetic beauty and shocking violence. . . . But esthetic considerations alone do not make a book a bestseller. Rather it is a combination of factors—how it is marketed to a general audience, how it reflects the hopes or anxieties of its readership, or how it speaks to pressing contemporary social or political issues. (Lee Understanding 19) What Lee makes clear, and rightly so, is that readers were far from waging battles about Kingston’s Chinese roots: they instead saw The Woman Warrior as another battle in a definitely feminist agenda of shaping a self-achieving life for its unnamed protagonist. Country of origin was of less interest, in this case, than the battle

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between traditional mother and newly independent daughter, facing an abyss of loneliness should she walk in her own direction. In many ways, Maxine Hong Kingston behaved more as if she were representing a century of women’s learning to be independent, or as W. Lawrence Hogue so rightly saw, as if she were partaking of African-American women’s independence. Kingston could not move far from the literary fashion of the 1970s, when historicizing postmodernism was the preferred critical mode. In Kingston’s idiosyncratic way, she created a vantage point for what she knew of history in both China and the United States: without naming her narrator, she spoke for the ages-old conflicts between those countries, and she forced her readers to acknowledge a history that may have been more legendary than factual. Kingston did not simplify the postmodernist rubric of historiographic particulars; she instead mined her knowledge of family beliefs. In the words of critic Amy Ling, Kingston had the knowledge and the temerity to weave “history” into modernday political action—as she did soon after her graduation from University of California at Berkeley. She taught, married a classmate, and then lived in Hawaii for seventeen years. Meanwhile, she wrote. After The Woman Warrior won its prizes in the late 1970s, she wrote China Men, and then it won the American Book Award for 1981; a decade later her novel, Tripmaster Money, won the PEN West Award for Fiction. Leading a charge that was more than political, more than ethnic, more than feminist, Kingston aimed at expressing human feelings (despite political oughts and shoulds); she mixed California slant with the most staid Asian locutions, and she juxtaposed story with memoir, outcry with poem, as if language were a patternless flow. Starting with The Woman Warrior, according to Ling, “Kingston sought to come to an understanding of her own youth and upbringing, which was beset by conflicting standards of behavior: the self-sacrificial, filial obligations demanded of Chinese girls versus the independence and self-fulfillment promised to American children.” How was she to fit the Chinese “ghost stories and legends her mother funneled into her imagination to the American world of neon and plastic?” More to the point, “how was she to find her own voice and realize her worth with a mother who claimed to have cut her daughter’s frenum and in a society that devalued daughters?” (Ling Oxford 459). Once Kingston had worked through the varied episodes of the “talk story” that comprised The Woman Warrior, she moved easily into the attitudes of viewing tradition versus today’s reality. Called “memoir” by marketing groups and reviewers, her first two books capitalized on a balance of fictional techniques. Lee discusses the differences between China Men and The Woman Warrior in terms of relevant history rather than gender: it imagines and chronicles the migration and labor stories of generations of men in Kingston’s family, including her father. It re-tells well-known Chinese myths and literary works. It offers brief, fable-like vignettes that seem to straddle the line between history, legend, and personal essay. (Lee Understanding 39)

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In some senses China Men is less lyrical than was The Woman Warrior, a change in language that might support the notion that the latter was more autobiography than pastiche.14 W. Lawrence Hogue sees most of Kingston’s work as autobiographical, bringing as she does the historical into the personal and asking readers to assume that the unnamed narrator has the power to transform not only facts but cultural milieu. Validating history is a viable part of the transformation Kingston achieves (Hogue Race 111). She is not interested primarily in writing an account of ethnic childhood, doing so by using a simple representational style. (All cultures that are not mainstream take on the aura of social studies, and one imagines the brightly colored illustrations of middle-school geography books, even if they rob distinctive information of any real color.) Instead of what had become the mannered style of writers representing a new and strange information base, Kingston’s objective in resolving her modern condition—her alienation and fragmentation, her lack of social identification, and her lack of historical continuity—is to create a version of the Chinese past that can connect with and verify her subjective Chinese American present. (Ibid. 114) The problem, for both Hogue and Lee, in moving from Kingston’s memoirs to her novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, is the way she has borrowed from the method and scope common to African-American cultural materials for her own use. Once the reader gets past the fictional character of playwright Wittman Ah Sing, speaking for an esthetic consciousness, she may have found Kingston’s use of the trickster figure remote.15 In some ways retrospective, this 1989 novel reflects on the Asian-American woman’s received criticism, from the men of her acquaintance and—in Kingston’s case—from fellow writers because of her innate position culturally. (With The Woman Warrior, some of the harshest criticism came from Frank Chin, who was revered as an important Asian-American writer well before 1976.) Kingston was well aware of ironies that abounded when she necessarily felt that she needed the permission of men who wrote to join their clique. Even though she had closed The Woman Warrior with the scene of the narrator and her mother participating in a joint talk story, she had no answer for the critique of older and more powerful men. Her creation of Wittman Ah Sing served to make her answer clear. The three narrative sources for Tripmaster Monkey have been described as the legend of Gwan Goong,16 along with the evocation of both the Chinese Monkey King and his magical staff. This figure, an archetypal trickster king, is fluid: he can become any one of seventy-five supposedly real figures. In his joke playing, his avenues for trickery are countless. The Monkey King’s power over his staff, which can increase in size until it will crush any enemy, is paramount. Kingston has created a third powerful force in her novel, perhaps the most powerful: she draws on Rainer Marie Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurida Brigge, a conventional statement of

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existentialism and, relatedly, mourning. These various strands create a clearly postmodern chaos, so Kingston’s readers were disappointed in the book. For most of the novel, Wittman Ah Sing is a free man—and he sees his freedom as the gift of both China and the United States. Descended from Walt Whitman, Wittman feels joy in his physical body, as well as in his craft as a playwright. But he also sees himself as the descendant of the Chinese King of Monkeys—he is not what Hogue calls “a centered subject.” In the latter part of the work, Wittman changes genders, he has given up his home, and he makes no plans: he has become a postmodern entity. He uses no stable language; his life is trickery. He is either a ghost or a hipster. In any case, he can find no suitable narrative for himself, even in the midst of his diligent work to write and then produce his play. In Kingston’s personal interpretation:Wittman “starts out in the book as a poet. . . . And then, he wants to make a difference, socially. And then, he wants to form community.”17 According to Julia Lee, Wittman has become a senior citizen, having aged just as has his author. The softening of people’s criticism of him follows—and Kingston seems to mourn as she leaves the playwright alone and sick. She carefully tells him about Fa Mu Lan’s death (or, here, Fa Mook Lan), and a death by her own hand.18 Because Fa Mu Lan was, seemingly, invincible, the fact of her chosen death sobers the reader. Kingston explains that she escaped her life because she had little choice but to marry the Emperor, as one of his many wives; powerful as she was, in this matter—frustrating the most powerful MAN in her kingdom—she had no equivalent power. For critics who had consistently read Kingston’s books as feminist statements, this novel about an aging man stays in that flamboyant tradition—if only through the suicide of the bravest woman warrior known to China. Writing with her own distinctive combination of autobiography (of Kingston) and analysis of her writing, Lee explains the author’s unexpected plot choice this way: the fact that Kingston’s readers initially respond with disbelief to the death of this fictional and mythic character speaks to how potent and powerful a figure Fa Mu Lan has been.When readers or colleagues ask Kingston “Why?: they are no doubt wondering why she felt the need to kill the character with whom she is most closely associated and who made her famous, a symbol of resistance and resilience, especially since there does not seem to have been any pressing or political reason for Kingston to do so. As usual, Kingston doesn’t really provide any answers. After acknowledging that the source for this story is the People’s Republic of China and that they may be writing a “revisionist history,” she simply asks “Why continue to live?” (Lee Understanding 111) Never as noncommittal as she might sound here, Julia Lee sets her controlling insights about Kingston in the midst of a wealth of information about this author’s constant, and often political, sentiments. Lee devotes disproportionate space to tracking Maxine Hong Kingston’s sometimes outspoken political opinions, beginning

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with her days in college and continuing to her most recent editorial work, bringing out the 2006 book collection, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, which followed by three years her The Fifth Book of Peace. Lee also sees that Kingston herself is aging and that during the years she was working on I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, she lost numerous friends, many of them fellow writers. As Lee puts the matter, That she includes within the pages of I Love a Broad Margin her own version of a book of the dead reinforces a sense that Kingston feels that she is near the end of her life and at the end of her own words. She wants to live long enough to finish a translation of her father’s poetry, but she already knows that her love of and fascination with language is fading. It is a love and fascination that have seen her through the writing and publication of nine books, countless essays and interviews, documentaries, and writing workshops. (Ibid. 112) Now, says this critic, Kingston may want to “become reader of the world.” Perhaps she is satisfied with what she has created. Literary history tends to create piles—piles of books, piles of authors and readers, piles of marketing managers and librarians. In the case of this transition between the writing career and life of Maxine Hong Kingston, set against the still fully vigorous writing career and life of Michael Chabon, two very distinct books are separated by only a year. In 1988 Chabon published his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; in 1989, so too did Maxine Hong Kingston, when Tripmaster Monkey, her first novel, appeared. Chabon then began the route that put his name on a quantity of readers’ lips—though never so many as had earlier found Maxine Hong Kingston’s work— and when his second novel appeared, Wonder Boys became not only a successful book but a reasonably successful motion picture. Born midway through what Cowart considers the late second postmodern generation—give or take a few years—Chabon (born 1963) fits into readers’ consciousnesses with such writers as Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rick Moody, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Strout, and others. Perhaps more interesting than his birth year is the fact that his prose has, from the start of his publications, given off the exuberance of a young speaker—plenitude, almost effervescence, the lush precision of words used in a frenzy of apt celebration. Joseph Dewey quotes a personal 2012 email from Chabon, in which he explains his stylistic aims: I want my sentences to climb high, dive deep . . . but I will always put my hand out to the reader, to say, “Come with me”—not because I want to be pursued or shadowed but because I sincerely want their company. Literature to me—pre- and post-Pynchon—is a partnership between reader and writer, a game played by equals, not to ensure one’s victory and the other’s corresponding loss but simply and purely for the pleasure to be had therein. (Dewey Understanding 2)

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As Dewey makes clear, his interest in Chabon’s work stems partly from his proficiency as an evocative contemporary novelist and partly from his evident interest in postmodernism. The two considerations do not always align—even when writers of the twenty-first century talk about Barth, Pynchon, Gass, and Coover, their sense of what writers during the 1960s and the 1970s were aiming to create may differ from their own senses of today’s important directions. Dewey calls the Chabon generation a kind of post-postmodern, with writers’ attention directed primarily to narrative (instead of trickery). He states that these post-postmodern writers deliberately brought together the defining elements of the two principal expressions of the American narrative at mid-century: the formal extravagances of the postmodern era and the compelling consolations of old school storytelling. Like the postmodern excesses and self-conscious audacities of Pynchon and his disciples, Chabon’s fictions have been extravagant experiments in form (testing particularly the dynamics of narrative voice); they have been playful, selfconscious investigations in reanimating traditional genres; they have been executed in a lyric prose that often dazzles with its density and its kinetics, foregrounding, in the best postmodern tradition, the author’s nimble dexterity with language.19 In this critic’s establishing the link between postmodernism and Chabon’s work, he traces the various accolades (though some of these, of course, might be for characteristics not related to the postmodern): Across four decades now, Chabon’s writings—novels, short stories, and a growing body of engaging essays—have become a staple in both high school and university syllabi. He has been consistently praised by reviewers and sought out by interviewers. He has been listed by both the New Yorker and Granta as among the most important writers of his generation. His books, despite the stigma of being serious fiction, have maintained a regular presence on best-seller lists and several of his titles have been optioned as big-budget film projects. He has been feted with prestigious awards, most notably an O. Henry Award for best short fiction (1999), a Nebula Award for best novel in science fiction (2007), a Hugo Award for best novel in science fiction or fantasy (2008), and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (2001). . . . In 2012, Chabon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Dewey Understanding 2–3) As introduction to Chabon’s work, this critic quotes liberally from his fiction. Here he draws from a scene in Wonder Boys, where Chabon is drawing the shadowy self-persecution of the well-known writer, Q., explained in words understood by both Q. and his author:

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[he] had become his own doppelganger, a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all of Q.’s personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world, a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection. Only every once in a while, Q. said, did his secret sharer act—overpowering his unwilling captor, so to speak, assuming his double’s place long enough to say or do something unwise or reprehensible and thus to ensure that human misfortune, the constant object of the Other Q,’s surveillance and the theme of all his recollections, continued unabated as Q.’s life. Otherwise, of course, there would be nothing to write about. “I blame it all on him,” the dapper little man declared, to the apparent delight of his audience, “the terrible mess I have made of my life.” ( Wonder Boys 76) Chabon works something like a ventriloquist: here he is not only Q. but the rapt younger writer who listens to him. In contrast, Chabon distills the strengths of Q.’s abilities into those of a later character based on his grandfather—seen here during his own adolescence: “He wandered in the summertime from breakfast to dark, ranging as far east as the rancid Delaware and as far south as the Navy Yard. He saw an evicted family drinking tea on the sidewalk amid their beds, their lamps, their Victrola, a parakeet in a brass cage. He unfolded a packet of newspaper on the lid of an ashcan and found the eyeball of a cow. He saw children and animals beaten savagely and yet with patience and care. He saw a convertible Nash mobbed outside an AME church. Marian Anderson stepped out of it and lit up his memory, six decades afterward, with the crescent moon of her smile. South Philadelphia was broadcast with Moonblatts and Newmans, those cousins who one day would people the weddings and funerals of my mother’s and my childhoods. Their homes served as my grandfather’s way stations. In threading his routes from one to the next, past blocks controlled by Irish and Italians, my grandfather laid the foundations of his wartime work. He cultivated secret contacts among the Italian bakers and grocers, running errands or working a broom in exchange for payment or pennies, lemon ice, or a twist of warm bread. He studied the nuances of people’s ways of speaking and carrying themselves. If you hoped to avoid a beating on Christian street, you could alter your gait and the cant of your head to look as though you were walking where you belonged. ( Moonglow 8) With his Jewishness a secret, this character was wise to the ways of mainstream culture, and wily enough to play at mimicking it.

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From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay come Chabon’s lines about the splendor of human language: The imagination is the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, casualties and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. ( Kavalier 582) Dewey uses this particular quote from Chabon to establish that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay becomes his unexpectedly successful novel, winning for him the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 2001. As a devoted reader of comic books, and a collector of comic book trivia, Chabon did not draw the comics themselves, but he created a plausible narrative about creating comics. Dewey’s discussion of this novel allows him to show his readers the somewhat defensive posture Chabon had adopted, even as late as 1995. He points to the great differences between the first two novels and the early stories and the occasion of The Amazing Adventures of Karalier & Clay. Dissatisfied with what he called his “lightweight” fiction, Chabon had begun mining his family stories, including those from Europe. In this process he discovered the narrative of a cousin, trained in Europe as an artist, whose talent in drawing would lead him to write and market successful comic books. Accordingly, Joseph Kavalier and Sammy Clay, his American partner cousin, become the subjects of Chabon’s most exciting, and most unexpected, novel. Filled with humor, exciting language, and the spirited hopefulness of the young, Chabon’s prize-winning novel—at over 700 pages—made readers conscious of its scale. Encyclopedic in a carnivalesque way, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay included a bevy of named and caricatured figures, among them Orson Welles, actor Franchot Tone, crusading New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, New York governor Al Smith, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and surrealist artist Salvador Dali, and multiple intricately woven and highly engaging plotlines that shuttled deftly across more than thirty years and across three continents, including the frozen outback of Antarctica.With new-found maturity Chabon now explored the tension between escape and engagement on a cultural and historical scale. (Dewey Understanding 74) Critics commented on Chabon’s new expression of the circles of Jewish thought that made living in New York City fascinating: some thought that Chabon had never before so embraced his faith. Others saw that this novel biographied three decades of American (and European) life. Dewey talks about critics’ appreciating Chabon’s “enthralling sense of storytelling, and its self-consciously generous detailing.” Chabon created a smoothly running narrative that never stole fire from the

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actual history it portrayed. In the critics’ questions: “Jewish identity? Gay rights? Tolstoyan scale? American cultural history? Outrage over the inequities of capitalism? Fabulous comic book characters with flamboyant backstories? Certainly these elements seemed radically new for Chabon” (Ibid. 75–76). There were shorter fictions. But then in 2012 came another surprisingly adept novel, this one woven of four intricate plotlines. Telegraph Avenue feels like a contemporary novel. It has elements of 9/11 and terrorism included in the warp of its timeliness. But it also speaks to, and of, the Obama years (there is even repetition of that too-familiar phrase, “the audacity of hope”). Critics consider Telegraph Avenue Chabon’s most accomplished writing—although they quibble about narrative difficulty and stylistic over-polish. The two protagonists in this work are not European and American but they are of different races; they interact through four separate and separable story lines. Dewey describes those lines as being arranged “in a kind of staggered simultaneity,” and he privileges what he calls the fourth narrative, that “bittersweet reunion between Archy and a teenage son he did not know existed” (Dewey Understanding 121). Again, at his best treating father-son entanglements, Chabon privileges this fourth line. And Dewey, accordingly, privileges the author’s involvement in this intricacy: amid characters who so heroically defy boundaries, who so boldly catapult over divisions, it is easy to overlook the most heroic defiance of all: Chabon himself. In what is nearly the novel’s centerpiece . . . Chabon risks abandoning the compelling (and realistic) narrative lines entirely for what can be dismissed as a snarky act of residual postmodern gimmickry. In a twelve-page prose tour de force, a single tsunamic sentence free of narrow grammatical niceties, he records the free flight of a rare African grey parrot, the long time companion of Cochise Jones. (The musician’s signature gaudy leisure suits all bore the unmistakable imprint of claw marks on their shoulders. . . .) In the wake of its long time owner’s sudden death, the bird is freed. (Ibid. 125–26) Never eager to be absolved from postmodernism’s tendencies, Chabon’s stylistic borrowings add a sometimes-unnoticed layer to his narrative prowess—as in this case. When Chabon’s memoir appeared in the autumn of 2016, Moonglow became another of the most reviewed books of the season. In this case, because Chabon had never before written memoir, his focus on the grandfather and his associates during the Second World War plays in a somewhat different way. In Hamilton Cain’s enthusiastic review, he emphasizes the language used in what he calls a tale “that is both myth and ode,” creating the “exuberant meld of fiction and fantasy history that opens with the grandfather’s deathbed confession.” Although Cain refers to the book as a novel, he knows it is a fanciful memoir, and he praises it for its revelation of “delicate emotions.” It seems strikingly clear that, beginning with The Amazing

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Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, some of Chabon’s best energy as a writer is triggered by his memory of the role his family—and particularly his grandparents—has played in those reconstructions. One of the primary narratives in Moonglow (which takes its title from the Glenn Miller recording by that name, with its evocation of the deaths of Miller’s band in a plane crash, itself a synecdoche for the deaths of military forces throughout the world) is that of Chabon’s grandfather “finding” a German V-2 rocket. Comic as the war-time characters of Grandfather and the German Catholic priest, Father Nickel, are, caught in an accidental treasonous plot in Germany, the underlying terror of their discovery is itself a metaphor for wartime emotions. The priest explained to the United States soldier that the Church is helping him go on a mission to the moon, called the “Luna” mission. Immediately the old men are cast into their childhood personae, as joyous as any excited children would be with this prospect. (This narrative particularly touches Chabon’s grandfather because he had lost his best military friend, Alvin Aughenbaugh, in battle just a few weeks earlier: he is both physically and emotionally alone.) For the first time since his friend’s death, he laughs. “Please, laugh,” Father Nickel said with a show of generosity. “Laugh at your foolish old enemy.” My grandfather saw moonlight welling in the old priest’s eyes. He put a hand on Father Nickel’s shoulder. “The only difference between you and me, Father,” my grandfather said, “is that I never wrote it all down.” ( Moonglow 156) Bringing his readers into the confessional recounting of this surely improbable exploit, Chabon—operating here as one who does “write it all down”—begins describing the exploit itself on the following page, when his grandfather awakens from his sleep, warm in his moon suit. . . . He could hear his own heart beating. Bounding along the lunar surface in long arcs, half a million miles from the earth and its fires and alarms. Let it burn. Let it melt, let the rafters give way, let the whole thing collapse under the weight of its own sad gravity. The only thing spoiling his lunar idyll was the infernal itching at the back of his neck where the helmet attached, impossible to scratch in his suit and gloves of rubberized silk, so oddly reminiscent of warm dung. “Herr Lieutenant.” My grandfather opened his eyes in the dark. A recent disturbance among the cows below reverberated in the clanging of their bells. A straw from the bale he had been using for a pillow was jabbing him in the neck. He discerned Father Nickel’s head and neck peeking over the edge of the loft, hands gripping the ladder. . . .

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“I am sorry to wake you, Lieutenant.” There was something concealed in a fold of the old priest’s voice. . . . [Coming into full consciousness] the lieutenant realized the night was not over. Father Nickel was the enemy. “I’m sorry, Father. Unless you tell me right now—” “It’s a rocket, Fool.” the old priest said. “A downed rocket.” ( Moonglow 157–58) Representative of the way narrative works in Chabon’s fast-paced memoir, the “rocket” story, interrupted here on page 158, does not resume until page 233, and then one of his grandfather’s men, Diddens, is left alongside it in the field to protect it. What Chabon achieves here is threefold: he creates the boyish excitement of the German priest and his American grandfather; he universalizes this encounter by describing one night of battle—or, rather, of waiting for battle—during the Second World War; and he gave his readers technical information about Germany’s V-2 rocket.20 Readers were impressed with the compression Chabon’s memoir evinced, pushed from one episode to the next, reading the narrative—much of it to do with World War II—and occasionally a dialog with Pynchon about his own masterwork, Gravity’s Rainbow. War echoes war: as Chabon interpolates, speaking to the earlier author about the true horror of Nordhausen, “the experience of rocket attacks, and so many other things Pynchon had never lived through or seen” (Moonglow 248). Moonglow also addresses Chabon’s mother, who does reading of a very different kind. She is a Salinger advocate; but she also has guilt about her role in World War II. She confesses to Chabon that she has lost the photographs that her mother had saved for her, photographs of their relatives killed by Hitler (and in some cases by their relatives) in the concentration campus. The war’s impervious tentacles invade Chabon’s and his family’s lives without even acknowledging their comparative youth. It could be said that Moonglow is, among many other things, a sexual story. The war provides much more than “background,” especially when his grandmother’s guilt—and her madness—is explained as stemming from her family’s role in the Nazi atrocities. During the concentration camp scenes, Chabon uses the image of the skinless horse as both defamatory and indicative of the family’s complicity. Reviewers sometimes mentioned the ways in which Chabon created a massive canvas and then drew readers into exploring that space through his familiarity with popular culture—in this case, the songs from the 1940s, redolent of war, hope, and promise. And Moonglow works, as had The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to create people in quicksilver flashes and to follow their actions, and their results, with a sometimes charming evanescent glow—the glow in Father Nickel’s boyish eyes, the glow in Chabon’s own eyes as he sets up his entirely fanciful argument with Thomas Pynchon. The duty of Moonglow seems to be the deflating of memory: Which of these scenes is meant to represent truth? Which soliloquy accurately represents any real person’s memory? Or perhaps there are larger questions than these:What is narrative memory? What is personal memory? What is fantasy? What is imagination?

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In this writer’s ability to fuse disparate facts, memories, and imaginings, the reader sees the full force of a structure built on facts, on emotions, on that wrenching tug at the loss of beloved people (who existed in real life, not in writing), all brought together with consummate skill in words that make real whatever these imaginative structures pretend to be—in this case, Chabon’s Moonglow.

Notes 1 For a full discussion of what one might call the Angelou effect, see the section on women as autobiographers to follow, in Chapter 6. 2 If one of the acknowledged traits of postmodernism was the difficulty of a text, The Bluest Eye should have been placed immediately into that category. See my 1986 essay in the MLA publication, which resulted from my being invited to discuss a contemporary work at the MLA conference in 1985. My choice was The Bluest Eye. The year before, in 1984, critic Sandra Gilbert had discussed Sylvia Plath for the same program. Hard as it seems to believe today, many members of the MLA audiences were familiar then with neither Plath nor Morrison. 3 Sociology in 1970 had not yet turned its attention to standards of beauty that warped girls’ lives, and here in particular, the standards of white beauty that colored, and discolored, every image of beauty an African-American girl or woman tried to cherish. The Shirley Temple icon, the white baby doll, the too-curly hair—The Bluest Eye, the eye matching the blonde beauty which was the only acceptable standard for attractiveness: Morrison carefully inscribes early scenes with this metaphor pattern, but for readers intent on following plot, understanding came only sporadically. 4 These tactics included juxtaposition of scenes, unidentified narrative voices, and a rapidly moving storyline, among other techniques. 5 In The Origin of Others, Morrison writes, I wanted to reconfigure blackness. . . . In Paradise I imagined a reverse dystopia—a deepening of the definition of “black” and a search for its purity. . . . In Paradise, I played with these confused and confusing concepts of blackness. I began at the very opening, which signals race, purity, and violence: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” Just as “the white girl” is never identified, none of the killers is given a name in the initial onslaught. The men committing the murders are a son or nephew or brother, uncle, friend, brother-in-law—but no proper names. After this deliberate anonymity, each of the following chapters is headed by a woman’s name: Mavis, Grace, Seneca, Divine, Patricia, Consolata, Lone, and SaveMarie, without identifying her “race.”

(Morrison Origin 64–65) In an earlier interview, she had explained that the original title for Paradise was “War.” However, she saw that she had to change that word: “War was off-putting. Besides the novel wasn’t about war as we know it, with armies, navies, and so on. I was interested in the kind of violent conflict that could happen as a result of efforts to establish a Paradise. Our view of Paradise is so limited.”

(Wagner-Martin Maternal 178) 6 This was five years after the death of Morrison’s son—who was also her collaborator in their series of books for children—from cancer, the immense loss that had haunted Frank’s story in Home and the warning that shapes God Help the Child, a narrative that seems to predict doom even before Bride and Booker’s child is born. Hard as she worked

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to bring Beloved to a hopeful close, perhaps Morrison’s exploration of this personal emotion brings her to the same, dogged, persistent emotion. Loss can be told through only so many narratives. It is difficult to disguise. And it remains at the center of a bereaved person’s heart. 7 There was, of course, attention to Morrison’s novels long before this. Malcolm Bradbury, writing for The Columbia Literary History, had provided a detailed background of the evolution into postmodernism; near the end of his essay, he noted that during the 1970s, besides the names of expected writers, “readers should be following Walter Abish, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Richard Ford and more” (Bradbury Columbia 1151). 8 See as well Marni Gauthier’s discussions of Morrison in her 2011 Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction. 9 McHale makes this point: Historiographic metafictions challenge the master narratives of officially-received history, and propose counter histories—paranoid conspiracy theories, fantastic alternative histories, impossible, self-contradictory histories, and so on.Typically, story-rich and entertaining, historiographic metafictions reconcile metafiction with narrativity, bridging one of the fault lines that runs through postmodernist fiction and combining the metafictional difficulty of postmodernism with the accessibility of popular fiction: in short, they are double-coded.

(McHale Cambridge 76) 10 Hutcheon also comments about the character of Daniel in The Book of Daniel, saying that he is marked by being overtly specific, individual, culturally, and familially conditioned in his response to history, both public and private. The narrative form enacts the fact that Daniel is not a type of anything, no matter how much he may try to see himself as representing the New Left or his parents’ cause.

(Hutcheon in Perloff 63) 11 Inserting Doctorow’s now-classically postmodernist Ragtime into the timeline that opened this chapter, which began with Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, both 1970, and progresses to Morrison’s Sula in 1973, not reaching her Song of Solomon until 1976, the positioning of E. L. Doctorow, first with The Book of Daniel in 1971 and then, in 1975, his Ragtime makes clear why he was so firmly considered a postmodernist—even though his reliance on historical event gave some critics reason to temper their enthusiasm. 12 The successful film did not contribute to much understanding of the novel. 13 The reader could, easily, trace much of Doctorow’s fiction back to nineteenth-century history, as in the case of Billy Bathgate (1989), his child gangster-in-training, enamored by the city’s life of crime. In his case, Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd is being transformed to fit into the twentieth century. 14 Because so much less criticism of China Men exists, whether because The Woman Warrior was the first such surprisingly varied work or because more readers were convinced Kingston’s first book was a feminist outcry, a great many people who teach Kingston never mention China Men. It has been noted recently that The Woman Warrior is the most often taught book in modern higher education. 15 In Hogue’s description, even though the trickster is common to the literatures of Native America, African America, and Asian America, “he is a postmodern subject, with his multiple identities existing without a conflict” (Ibid.). 16 Ambivalent whether Gwan Goong is meant to bring pleasure or waste, this presence can lead into books and theaters, or it can be associated with gambling, beautiful women, and, even worse, fancy girls (Hogue Race 154).

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1 7 Quoted in Hogue Race 165, and see Hogue Race 151–68. 18 Lee points out that the retelling of the Fa Mu Lan story that occupies the ending of Tripmaster Monkey is the third of Kingston’s tellings: I Love a Broad Margin is actually Kingston’s third telling of the myth. The first version of the story, recounted in The Woman Warrior, is about a warrior woman who is honored for her martial prowess and her filial piety. The second version of the story from The Fifth Book of Peace is about what it means to come home from war. And the third version . . . is the story of Fa Mu Lan’s death.

(Lee Understanding 111) 19 Dewey next makes the turn into a near-realistic effect, comparing Chabon to Updike, because some of his techniques ape the twentieth-century realistic novel: Chabon’s fictions have developed recognizable characters caught up in recognizable (and often heartbreaking) dilemmas and enthralling storylines compelled by suspense, enriched with suggestive symbols, and working toward humane insights into love and death, work, and family.

(Dewey Understanding 3) 20 What he saw that day and what he heard from the survivors he questioned, persuaded him that there was no way Werner von Braun could have been technical director of the V-2 program while remaining unaware of how business was conducted in the Mittelwerk. Von Braun could not be crowned with the glory of the rocket without shouldering the burden of its shame. All the suffering my grandfather saw had been amassed and all the cruelty deployed. . . . It turned out that the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the bonds of gravity.

(Chabon Moonglow 254)

Suggested Further Readings Amian, Katrin. Rethinking Postmodernism(s). Amsterday: Rodopi, 2008. Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2003. Hurst, Mary Jane. Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Olsen, Lance. Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1990.

6 THE FUSION OF GENRES IN MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

In literary history, it is a commonplace that any national literature is known by the work of its poets. While that might once have been the case even in the United States, perhaps early in the nineteenth century, it has not been true for the wideranging impact of American letters for the last several hundred years. The United States, from the time of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, has been a country devoted to—and at times obsessed by—fiction. Soon after the end of World War II, once the production of ammunition had diminished so that publishing houses could once again buy paper and produce books, there was a short-lived interest in the American poem. It was a time for self-consciously differentiating between the English poem and the American, and it was somewhat heretical. The English-speaking world had, after all, grown up with the melodious lines of John Keats, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and William Wordsworth suffusing human ears. To become acute listeners of a truly distinctive American poetry required some retraining. The fervor that accompanied a new-found appreciation for such United States poets as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore was a ground-breaking moment. The flurry of interest that attended the writing of American poetry by such diverse “schools” as the New York poets, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, and the Confessional poets was unexpectedly profitable for American publishers. At the root of much of what was seen as postwar innovation was the writing of the now-aging doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, growing comparatively more famous each year, first for the five separately published volumes of his epic poem Paterson1 and then for his longer-lined (“variable foot”) poems that eventually won him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—posthumously, in 1963. At that time Williams had never been published in England at all. The direct line from Williams’s visibly American speech and, accordingly, the American poem, was Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl was, somewhat appropriately,

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the first famous work of the Beat Generation. That group of San Francisco poets, known and published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his City Lights bookstore and publishing house, consisted largely of poets—Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Robin Spicer, Charles Olson, Gregory Corso, Paul Blackburn, Peter Orlovsky, Richard Brautigan, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn, Lew Welsh, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, Neal Cassady, William Everson, William Burroughs, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Gael Turnbull, Ted Enslin, Carol Berge, Denise Levertov, Ron Silliman, Robin Blaser, Gary Snyder, and many others. City Lights became a beacon for Canadian poets such as Clark Coolidge and Bill Hawkins, as well as American poets from across the country. (Separating the poets into the camps of “Black Mountain” and “New York,” as if they existed in geographical space, rather than seeing the overlap within their techniques was less the point than asserting that change was afoot: something new was occurring in American poetry.) Even though Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and other of his novels became well known, it was Kerouac’s poetry that placed him with the Beats. It seems from this vantage point in the twenty-first century that much of what has come to characterize postmodern American poetry stemmed from the wideranging Beat poetry, whether it followed Ginsberg’s long-lined chant-like rhythms, not only in Howl but in his second collection, Kaddish; or Ed Dorn’s mixture of prose with poetry in his Slinger; or the sometimes scatological short poems of Whalen and Blazer. It was less a similarity of form than it was the sense of breaking out—or, at times, just the sense of breaking per se.2 Within the hierarchies of literary genres, perhaps it is not surprising that the genre that seemed to be the simplest, neatest, most rule-bound, and most traditional—that of poetry—was, in fact, erupting into surprising currents, directions that were unpredictable, and sometimes unpublishable. Postmodern American poetry is often identified with writing that has become known as L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry. Charles Bernstein so identified much of the writing being published during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. He lists as participants in this grouping such poets as Ron Sukenik, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson, Bob Perelman, Bernadette Mayer, Joanne Kyger, A. R. Ammons, Diane Wakoski, Clark Coolidge, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, and himself. Michael Palmer’s interest in lyrical and fragmented narrativity is illustrated when he opens his short poem “All Those Words” with this enigmatic three-sentence segment: All those words we once used for things but have now discarded in order to come to know things.There in the mountains I discovered the last tree or the letter A. What it said to me was brief. . . . Reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s nonsequential patterning, Susan Howe also uses language for, primarily, special effects. In her composing process, which draws on documents and stories from American history, she has written a long poem,

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“Articulations of Sound Forms in Time.” Mixing contemporary prose within a seventeenth-century replication of language in her quasi-captivity narrative, Howe creates viable meaning from seemingly scattered segments of poetry. In this poem, as in such books as My Emily Dickinson (1985), she speaks with a woman’s voice, undisguised, and varied, what McHale describes as “women’s speech, their silence, and their silencing: these are venerable topoi of misogynistic literature, which is to say of canonical literature generally” (McHale Obligation 204–05).3 Michael Davidson admits there is no genre that applies to this mix of history (or other kinds of prose) with poetry. He attempts to create a language that speaks to this process, calling it palimtext, and taking its derivation back to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and Robert Duncan’s Passages. He also sees connections with the practices of the “Objectivists,” who considered themselves aligned with William Carlos Williams. Davidson explains, “Olson’s and Duncan’s self-reflection marks a desire to make the means and materials of research part of the poem” (Davidson “Poetry” 87). In places of his discussion, he also terms the practice “poem-as-notebook.” As today’s poets incorporate their working methodology into their art, Davidson notes that “genre theory has no name for this kind of writing” (Ibid. 92). One of the most fascinating poets of the past three decades has been Lyn Hejinian, whose long and varied poem, “My Life,” remains intentionally unfinished. She has shown that there is no end to artistic life, nor is there a final form to the fluidity that marks existence.There is also the compelling work of Bernadette Mayer, whose use of notebooks in some of her writing—as in her Midwinter Day—has a powerful effect. Davidson points out about this poem that, rather than the notebook’s being the source for materials used retrospectively, [the notebook] is the activity of and for that day. Writing and living are so closely united that incidents like shopping or doing the wash merge imperceptibly with the act of writing about them. (Ibid. 90) A compatible commentary occurs in McHale’s segments about poetry that he considers postmodern. He speaks admiringly of Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2003 collection, Day, suggesting that Goldsmith’s form echoes what Mark Z. Danielewski achieved in The House of Leaves. Goldsmith’s Day includes its author’s detailed transcriptions of everything he found in one day’s issue of the New York Times, all the words, including running heads, the words in advertisements, market information, obituaries, the weather forecast—everything. The day he chose was Friday, September 1, 2000—the year in which John Barth foresaw the end of postmodernism. (McHale Cambridge 138) In these specifics of Davidson’s informed commentary about current practices in writing poetry that makes use of new devices for good effect, one sees a kind

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of gentle answer to what some readers find as the brashness in Marjorie Perloff ’s expansive definitions of postmodernism in separable genres. As Perloff wrote about the most recent American poetry, equating a number of esthetic positions with the poem itself, a critic might line up a dozen of today’s poets with a short summary of their recent books. There are quantities of expert poets in the United States, but so few published books of poetry are ever reviewed that finding these outstanding poets remains difficult. Perloff explains, “there is more ‘real’ poetry in one of Jonathan Brodsky’s wall panels or in Laurie Anderson’s performance pieces or in John Cage’s ‘Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake’ called Oratorio than in X’s or Y’s most recent book of poems” (Perloff Genres 5). One possible short listing of excellent American poets today might include Harriette Mullen, Greg Orr, Carolyn Forche,Tan Lin, Jennifer Mosley, Sherman Alexie, Natasha Trethewey, Erica Hunt, Nathaniel Mackey, Peter Giza, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Hass, W. S. Merwin, Rane Arroyo, Kimiko Hahn, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Nutley, Rae Armentraut, Juliana Spahr,Yosef Komunyakaa, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Leslie Scalapino—for a start. It could be said, of course, that a poem is a poem is a poem regardless of surface differences—so that a square-blocked prose poem by Robert Bly is not so different from an Emily Dickinson lyric: both depend on a reader’s apperception of not only lines but metaphors and language choices. The difference that has attracted countless critics in these past few decades has been the differences within various prose genres. Jonathan Culler stated emphatically at the start of this century that “our most crucial and tantalizing experiences of literature [are] located at the intersections of genre” (Culler “Non-Genre” 53). And as Chabon’s Moonglow makes clear, defining such an experimental work, from the perspective of genre, is intriguing. The fusion in genre distinction appears to have been an integral part of postmodernism’s self-consciousness. As Larry McCaffery wrote early on, The line between fiction and non-fiction, novel, and autobiography, literature and literary criticism had already become permeable in the 1960s when works such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing series, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Ronald Sukenick’s Up (1968), and Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse (1972) . . . led to all sorts of strange, undefensible texts. McCaffery continues to list these experimental, fused texts: Barthes’s S/Z (English translation 1977) and Barthes by Barthes (1977); William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1971) and The World Within the Word (1978); Michelle Cliff ’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Despise (1980); Ihab Hassan’s Paracriticisms (1975) and The Right Promethean Fire (1980); and Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973).

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McCaffery terms these works “part literary criticism, part prose poetry, part personal memoir, and philosophical musing.” He continues with these examples of postmodern fusion: Susan Griffin’s Word and Nature (1978) is a poetic essay that reads like a nouveau roman, while John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980) are lengthy prose poems that read like reflexive novels. Guy Davenport’s Tatlin! (1974) and Da Vinci’s Bicycle (1979) are assemblages of factual materials; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1981) and Great Expectations (1983) all combine fiction, myth, and autobiography. (McCaffery Columbia 1174) More than just a random list, McCaffery here presents a roll call of authors of the filaments of the work that helped to create the postmodern. He concludes this essay by saying “Creating texts that refuse to privilege one form of discourse over another . . . has important social and political implications” (Ibid.).4 Expanding on this important concept, one might take the case of Gilbert Sorrentino as illustration. Best known in the early postmodern period for his camp novel, Mulligan Stew, which includes—among other parts and pieces—a takeoff of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, complete with a mouth-watering Daisy, he was ranked with the better-known creators of the postmodern attitude. Named as frequently as was Stanley Elkin and Joseph McElroy, only a decade after Mulligan Stew, he was considered a Beat poet, friend of Charles Olson and Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg, a man whose poetry was as long-lined and digressive as that of his more famous friends. His poetry, however, was seldom anthologized. From here in the twenty-first century, it would appear that the most flamboyant changes within postmodern prose genres have occurred between the straightforward “novel”—in all its configurations before and after the rubric “postmodernism” came into common use—and at least two related subcategories, one of memoir linked with autobiography and the other what came to be termed “New Journalism.” Thirty years of observing a quantity of fused and melded forms have given readers a number of different-sounding categories, such as the nonfiction novel, the true-fact fiction, and the new life story, but the prose that occurs in all these subgenres is the same prose American writers were becoming famous for during modernism: using the language of American English in the task of effectively communicating—with clarity and finesse. It could be said to have begun with Truman Capote’s 1966 In Cold Blood, his absorbing, even searing account of two ex-convicts, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who in 1959 broke into the Clutters’ isolated Kansas farmhouse, tied up family members, and then killed them with point-blank shotgun blasts to the head. Supposedly motivated by robbery, Smith and Hickock found very little cash. The search for the murderers took months, but then they were caught, tried, and sentenced to death. Intrigued by the murder itself but also the setting—and

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the effect the murders would have on the small prairie town—Capote began what would become five years of intermittent research into the killers and their motivations. Part one established and described the murders; part two, the search; part three, the trial; and part four, the executions. Capote prided himself on using only facts (though some of these facts were later disproven), and on never sensationalizing his materials. He made it a point of getting to know the killers, and at some places, considered his work a “meditation” on kinds of modern evils. Had it not been for Capote’s fame (and the popularity of the recent film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn), this work would never have sold so many copies; some readers did not realize it was nonfiction. Critic Thomas Fahy sees the popularity of In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences as representative of readers’ appetites honed on mainstream television (dominated by crime investigations and violence), as well as the atmosphere of suspicion and fear emanating from the Cold War—rife with its own cadres of spies and executions, as in the Rosenbergs’ deaths. Whether in cities or on farms, most people found few friends to trust, and in the case of the financially disenfranchised—like these two killers, angrily poor—taking what they needed seemed justified. It was also McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklists, and the rationale that telling what a person knew was justified in this age of post-bomb annihilation. Sociologically, because both Perry and Dick had been delinquents as teenagers, their acts seemed to crystallize what happened to children of violence— from poor families—once they grew up. Poverty and adolescent delinquency exposed the American Dream as a cruel myth. It gave lie to the material wealth and familial stability promised by the suburbs and small-town America. Ultimately, when understood in the context of the 1950s, the importance of In Cold Blood consists in its exposure of the myths of American prosperity and suburban harmony and the realization that such myths—because property and harmony were unrealizable for so many—actually contributed to eruptions of violent, murderous rage. (Fahy Capote 116) With an impact far beyond anything Norman Mailer ever effected in his most revealing nonfiction (such works as The Executioner’s Song and The Prisoner of Sex), what Capote produced fed into the incipient interest already begun by Tom Wolfe’s funny, sparkling, and usually irreverent journalism, as in his 1965 essay collection, The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flame Streamline Baby, or his 1970 Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, among others. By the time of his most famous work, his 1979 The Right Stuff, he could easily have already retired from professional writing. According to Wolfe, along with Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Mailer, and some much younger journalists, incorporating the facts from one’s reporting might be the smallest element for New Journalism. What mattered was the larger-than-life personality of the writer: objectivity was a byword from the past. It was not only dated, it was anathema. Taking his identity from only the

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newest of the practices that marked New Journalism, Hunter Thompson thought of himself as the “gonzo” in “gonzo journalism.” Before he started collecting his work into books, which made him another famous newspaper writer, able to support himself without daily columns, Thompson earned his notoriety with essays about motorcycle gangs, as in The Nation, or about the decadence of the Kentucky Derby races (1970, Scanlan’s Monthly). Once he had moved into Playboy, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine, he had acquired all the fame he needed to investigate whatever he chose. One could not “investigate” everything, as even Thompson and Gay Talese discovered. A more profitable route, and a direction more interesting to people who thought of themselves as real writers, was that of the autobiographical essay, or memoir. Rather than just include the journalist within the essay, make the essay about the writer, in fact. The difference between Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and his The Armies of the Night, about his (and others’) march on the Pentagon as they protested the Vietnam War, was the role played by the writerly conscience. It was no accident that Mailer’s 1968 The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. Judging from the history of autobiography in any formal sense, one would not expect the genre to be winning Pulitzers: autobiographies were usually self-protective, rather than disclosive; they were considered something assigned for required reading in history classes rather than being fast-paced page-turners. “Autobiography” as the nineteenth century had understood it would have attracted no Norman Mailers. Leaving journalism to journalists and autobiography to historians-cum-autobiographers tended to leave open that large category of something-close-to-fictionbut-rooted-in-the self. Today’s literary critics call it memoir, and it runs the gamut from gold-medal-winning sports stars to people describing some terrible bereavement, from paraplegics telling survival stories to accounts of accomplishments of normal people, such as Cheryl Strayad’s Wild. And there are narratives of spectacular life endeavors. An ever-increasing category is the memoir written by political figures—or former political figures. The United States is nothing if not a country fascinated by political life. The writing of memoir began slowly (and still today is sometimes labeled as “autobiography”),5 but as we saw in Chapter 5, Maya Angelou found the tipping point for works that would be popular with readers. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1970, has never been out of print—in thirty or more languages as well as in English. In writing the six volumes of her life story, chronicling two marriages and other lovers, a career on stage and screen, living as a single mother, supporting herself as a black woman throughout the world, and being a politically active African American during the 1960s, Angelou saw ways of interesting the thousands of readers who bought her books (poetry as well as memoir), treating those readers as the sentient and understanding human beings they are. Angelou’s series of memoirs would be a new and different version of African-American “uplift” literature, but there would be little fictional about it.

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To take a glimpse at a literary calendar for the United States in 1973, just before the publication of Angelou’s Gather Together in My Name, her second volume of memoirs, which appeared in 1974, is to see how varied these currents of new generic forms had already become. Hunter S. Thompson’s better-selling second book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 appears. More importantly, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is first published, the novel that becomes the apex of successful postmodern fiction, a work that has recently come to a kind of completion, as we have seen, with Michael Chabon’s 2016 memoir, Moonglow. Toni Morrison publishes her second novel, Sula, alongside Rita Mae Brown’s comic if scatological Rubyfruit Jungle, the first lesbian novel to appear from a commercial press. There are also novels by Don DeLillo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Philip Roth, and Tim O’Brien, as well as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (home of the candidly comic “zipless fuck”). Robert B. Parker begins his “Spencer” detective series; Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde publish poem collections; and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., publishes Breakfast of Champions. Reviewers have almost too much to sink their teeth into: but these are the days of book reviews in newspapers as well as magazines and academic journals. Everyone is reading book reviews. Everyone is reading. Approachability may have become the salient ingredient of American literature. Not that every high school student ran out and bought Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. But some did. Very few bought Morrison’s Sula, but a great many purchased Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. After having published one collection of poetry, Fruits and Vegetables, and dropping out of her Columbia graduate program, Jong discovered that writing popular novels was a good way to earn a living.Vonnegut, Parker, Roth, and O’Brien were learning the same thing. There is no easy way to travel from 1973, one of the early hearts of postmodernism (along with various other -isms) to the rage for memoir that has been cultivated in today’s market. It progressed through reader interest in not only Maya Angelou but through Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), through Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcolm X) [Malcolm Little], through Piri Thomas (Down These Mean Streets), through Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice), through Anne Moody (Coming of Age in Mississippi), through John Hersey (The Algiers Motel Incident), and through more general memoirs by Norman Podhoretz, Richard Rodriguez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Herbert Gold, Irvin D. Malin, and Frank Conroy, as well as Lillian Hellman, whose series of memoirs occupies five books. Angelou’s multi-volume memoir interlaced with Hellman’s multi-volume memoir and brought worlds of attention to the writing of memoir by women. New to nearly all the genres in American literature, women writers benefited from this attention, so much so that publishers began looking for other women writers who were interested in memoir. The form was still fluid, still permeable, so eager writers could shape the category to their own ends. Many memoirists wrote of illnesses, as did Audre Lorde in her 1980 The Cancer Journals, opening publishers’ doors to such writers as Marya Hornbacher with her Wasted, A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted,

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Alice Sebold’s Lucky, Louise DeSalvo’s Breathless, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, and Nancy Mairs, with her series of memoirs about her life with multiple sclerosis (such best-selling books as Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Disabled). Paul Monette wrote of sex changes in his Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, which evolved into his AIDs memoir, Last Watch of the Night (1994); Edmund White, about growing up gay in New York (in 1982, A Boy’s Own Story, reprised in 2009 as City Boy).Writers wrote about parents: Geoffrey Wolff ’s The Duke of Deception about his father;Tobias Wolff about his in This Boy’s Life; Mary Catherine Bateson’s With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson; Richard Ford’s Between Them: Remembering My Parents, while more and more women wrote about their mothers: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Gloria Steinem’s “Ruth’s Song,” Kim Chernin’s In My Mother’s House, Minrose Gwin’s Wishing for Snow, A Memoir, Sissela Bok’s Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir, Letty Pogrebin’s Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, Carole Ione’s Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color, and many more such publications. One of the most dramatic memoirs published late in the twentieth century was Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ostensibly about the deaths of the author’s parents, leaving him and his sister to care for the baby of their family). Written with all the technical experimentation that might be expected in any postmodern novel, Eggers’ writing—carefully looped into digressive flashbacks, interior scenes, and direct authorial commentary—won him a spot as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. It also won him a million-dollar advance for his second book project. The literary world was talking about Dave Eggers. Or, rather, the literary world was talking about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Somewhat ironically, Eggers seldom wrote with such linguistic abandon again. He instead channeled that huge monetary advance into unusually interactive ways of involving readers. First, he created McSweeneys, his magazine, paper, and book publishing company in San Francisco (many of his own later books have appeared from McSweeney’s). Second, he began setting up youth centers, the first at 826 Valencia (later centers are all named “826” in various cities), in the Mission District of San Francisco. As part of McSweeneys, Eggers initiated the Voice of Witness Project, working through oral history to find and publish stories of actual people. His books that have been a part of that series include What Is the What, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award; Zeitoun, the 2009 story of a New Orleans SyrianAmerican businessman caught and devastated in Hurricane Katrina, by racial prejudice no less than winds and floods; and, in 2018, The Monk of Mokha, a narrative which traces the existence of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who has recently moved to Oakland, California, from the Middle East and become an importer of Ethiopian coffee. For the man interviewing him, supposedly Eggers himself, Mokhtar gives a variety of impressions: Mokhtar speaks quickly. He is very funny and deeply sincere, and illustrates his stories with photos he’s taken on his smartphone. Sometimes he sighs. Sometimes he wonders at his existence, his good fortune. . . . Sometimes he

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laughs, amazed that he is not dead, given he lived through a Saudi bombing . . . and was held hostage by two different factions in Yemen after the country fell to civil war. But primarily he wants to talk about coffee. ( Monk, x–xi)6 Without counting titles since the Eggers’ memoir appeared in 2000, one would guess that any writer who had a good story could have found an agent and a publisher to encourage a project.Very recently, and with a very unlikely effect, that of best-sellerdom, Paul Kalanithi’s writing about the last months of his life after he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer—titled When Breath Becomes Air and published in 2016 by Random House—has moved thousands of readers. As a young neurosurgeon himself, he opens his memoir by reading the CT scan images: he will die soon. This is the opening description of his memoir: “the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated” (Breath 3). The memoir is, necessarily, finished by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy. There is a clear and responsible reason the book remains on the bestseller list after nearly two years. Most readers appreciate the honesty and clarity of Kalanithi’s telling. The twenty-first century was marked by such memoirs, such honest drawings of deaths. It seemed to become a fashion for women writers—Joyce Carol Oates, Kay Redfield Jamison, Sandra Gilbert, Elizabeth Alexander, Joan Didion—to express their grief at the death of their husbands. Reviewers admitted that there was nothing faddish about the expressions or the language chosen, but it seemed natural that women familiar with words would choose writing to rid themselves of such great grief. When in 2016 poet Elizabeth Alexander explains that she and her two sons find her husband on the basement floor, she creates a “now and then” schema to try to get at the changes that occur during the death process: We three found him there on the floor.The big boy named for the wise king knew his father was dead. It never occurred to me that he could be dead.The younger boy’s thoughts were all magic. If I had gone to check him, Simon said, and They’ll bring him back. I breathed into his mouth. He was supple. The 911 operator asked if my husband was breathing and I could not say. The air around him was warm and vaporous. How many times that day and in following days and weeks and months did I say “my husband.” My husband died unexpectedly. I just lost my husband. Lost implies we are looking, he might be found. I lost my husband.Where is he? I often wonder. As I set out on some small adventure, some new place, somewhere he does not know, I think, I must call him, think, I must tell him, think, What he would think? Think what he thinks. Know what he thinks. When I held him in the basement, he was himself. Ficre. When I held him in the hospital as they worked and cut off his clothes, he was himself.

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When they cleaned his body and brought his body for us to say goodbye, he had left his body, though it still belonged to us. . . . His spirit had clearly left as it had not left when we found him on the basement floor and I knew that he could hear us. Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone. (Alexander Light 41–42) The memoir of intense grieving that opened this market—literally—to the world of readers was Joan Didion’s 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking. In her reminiscence of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her worried account of the illness of their only child, Quintana Roo.7 The outpouring of readers’ sorrow in 2005 led to a stage version, with Vanessa Redgrave as the Didion-protagonist. Didion’s technique does not change from one book to the next; the fragmented language, the protagonist’s inability to believe that her husband has died, the compulsion to live as though John Gregory Dunne would return (thus, the emphasis on the duration of a year, a year of “magical thinking,” a way to retrieve the man she had loved so dearly). Well-titled, Didion’s memoir does not spare her character as it shows the reader how distraught she is: she plays fruitless games with the God who has robbed her. As critic Jane Danielewicz summarizes, Didion knows that her life is untenable; that a life without meaning is impossible. In a nutshell, this is the dilemma her book addresses. . . . Because she has lost all sense of meaning, Didion acts by investigating the experience of John’s death in order to amend the situation. (Danielewicz Memoir 23) Didion uses very short chapters (in both memoirs), so the reader experiences the effect of prose poetry. Sections are not connected: they simply appear, as if from a distraught speaker’s mind. Dissociative, unconsoled, the woman’s mind moves without transition from one idea to another. My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. ( Year 27)

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The connections Didion creates are almost entirely metaphoric. Sometimes these metaphors are the only reflection of what the protagonist feels: otherwise, she chats away as if she is surrounded by friends. The reader, however, knows that is not the case. Didion structures The Year of Magical Thinking so that the reader understands that, despite her own assumptions, she is not behaving rationally. For instance, she hangs on desperately to her husband’s shoes, worried that he will have nothing to wear when (not if ) he returns. Thoughts of Didion’s parents, dead at 91 and mid-80s, punctuate her reveries, and she seems beset by the worry that she will break her leg as she crosses a street. Then, without parents or husband, she will have nobody to care for her. Much less trivial than one would expect, Didion’s psyche experiences a hampering of normalcy. She cannot even remember what it was like to be cared for and loved. Following the author’s language through her memoir, it is less as if her grief overpowers her than that her emotional life is stunted. Rather than using words so genuine that they bring a reader to great sorrow, Didion takes the tactic of using impressionistic, metaphoric language, leaving her reader burdened by either reticence or bluntness. Two recent memoirs by American writers show the versatility of the memoir form. In the recent book by Native American writer Sherman Alexie, titled You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir that focuses on his relationship with his mother, Lillian, on the occasion of her death. Much of his story includes his life as a writer, which begins with his birth as a hydrocephalic—a condition that led to many surgeries and much reconstruction, as well as demanding almost constant care from his beleaguered mother. So his story of health difficulties is, of necessity, part of his relationship story, and his mother’s addictions seem to result from all these factors. Part song, part poetry, and part various kinds of prose, Alexie’s complicated mix of writing draws the strengths from each type of writing. It is reminiscent of Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—filled with surprising moments of humor set against striking scenes of emotional pain, and in this case, the shifting among kinds of writing seems very effectively planned. There is precision in the positioning, for example, of a poem titled “After Brain Surgery,” which opens I forget what I was trying to say One word or another gets in the way Of the word I meant to use. Nothing stays. I forget what I was trying to say, So I say something else. I compensate. Like a broken horse, I’ve learned a new gait (Love 397). Standing alone in their chosen form, each segment of Alexie’s memoir reaches, as here, more than half way through the book, the reader is forced back to some of those early, incredible years of mothering the child who seems to be unrepairable.

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Earlier in the memoir, Alexie orients the reader as he describes arriving at the funeral home where his mother’s body lies: he titles this segment “Everything Costs” and it opens, Sitting in the funeral home, with my mother’s body lying in view in another room only twenty feet away, I paid for her coffin and burial and transportation with a credit card. I had enough cash to pay for all the expenses, but I wanted to collect the Alaska Airlines miles. The bureaucracy of death. The sacredness of death. The sacredness of bureaucracy. The beauty of frequent flyer miles. “Did you know my mother?” I asked the white undertaker. And yes, of course, he did. “I talked to Lillian at many wakes and funerals,” the undertaker said. “She was a funny person.” I’d been to twenty or thirty funerals on my reservation, but I realized that the undertaker had probably been to a hundred or more—he’d buried so many of my fellow tribal members. No matter how much you think you know about death, there is always somebody else who knows more. ( Love 60) Carefully operating as an accomplished storyteller, Alexie—prize-winning Native American writer for these past decades—tells his and his mother’s story with care and deft timing, placing fragments of their lives together in his objective composite arrangement. A reader has the same moving reaction when reading the memoir (almost as current) of the young novelist who migrated from Russia as a child. Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure, A Memoir carries the wryly loving name his mother called him— physically inept, never prepossessing—as he sets the stage, describing in great detail his failed romance with a Southern girl while he is a college student. In his 2014 memoir, Shteyngart narrates carefully about the differences between Russia and the parts of America he knows. Just as Alexie had incorporated plentiful details about his earlier life on his reservation, this account of the tormenting changes as an immigrant family moves across continents has a double texture. In some ways, the dual nature of both these books is reminiscent of the patterns of memoirs from history—for instance, the more than six hundred accounts written by Native Americans early in the twentieth century. It may be that recognizing that people see them as strange brings words to consciousness. The varieties of nonfiction prose, whether considered as journalism or memoir or autobiography, create a marketing thrust that helps bookstores sell product (regardless of category). One further name to mention, occasioned by critic Maurizio Ascari, is “life narrative,” another flexible term that might be useful for grouping narratives. He defines the term this way:

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ranging from the novel to the memoir and biography, but also recently developed hybrid forms such as graphic novels, graphic memoirs and autobiographical fiction.The term life narratives encapsulates the idea that narrative is grounded in experience, both one’s own and other people’s. It evokes not only the liberating power of fiction, with its ability to create alternative worlds, but also the documentary and performative dimensions of confession and testimony—two ethical acts. (Ascari Global 17)

Notes 1 Williams had spent his life in the mixed-class and mixed-race town of Rutherford, New Jersey, where he grew up and then practiced medicine (complete with house calls) his entire life. When he spoke about replicating “the speech of Polish mothers” in his poetry, he was not speaking metaphorically. He felt that the larger New Jersey city of Paterson offered more variety, more poetic opportunity (in its falls, its parks, its scent of the modern), and so that town named his epic masterpiece. 2 Beat poetry was incredibly diverse. Ginsberg mined as many Jewish traditions as he could fit into a poem; Duncan used mysticism; Levertov brought her strong beliefs in Hasidic traditions, along with her mother’s Welsh and her father’s Russian literatures; Snyder praised the natural world in Oriental-sounding lines; Creeley perfected a kind of minimalist non-language; Ferlinghetti worked with speech/sound accented lines; DiPrima incorporated graphic art of her own making into her verbal art—the ideal and idealized Beat poem was to be welcoming, open to readers’ minds and interests. It was to serve as an antidote to the horrors of the contemporary world—the bomb, the Holocaust, the thousands of war dead—and then to move past those horrors into an almost comic acceptance of human frailties. When Ginsberg spoke to Walt Whitman in a California supermarket, when Corso meditated on heterosexual marriage, when Kerouac mimicked jazz rhythms in his “Mexico City Blues,” they forced readers to respond with a mixture of humor and calm. 3 When in 2011 Susan Howe won the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime work in poetry, readers were enthusiastic. Her most recent collections—Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), and That This (2010)—move further into language removed from history, but her previously published poems, which often incorporate American history, may be her most lasting work. 4 A bit later, McCaffery also noted, I think correctly, that “The period from 1965 to l975 was an extraordinarily rich one for literary experimentation—comparable, perhaps, only to the 1920s in the quality and quantity of works produced.” He also commented that of the new novels produced in that decade, many “seemed to be about a writer writing a novel or was a re-assemblage of an earlier work of fiction” (McCaffery Muse 253–54). 5 Gertrude Stein in her ironically titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—which was more or less “the autobiography of Gertrude Stein”—is one of America’s most celebrated memoirists. When the book appeared in the early 1930s, it was one of several hundred works written by modernist literary and artistic personalities worldwide. 6 Eggers has written screenplays, books for children, stories, and novels that are not part of the oral history series (and are only at times written in his documentary style)—among the latter, A Hologram for the King, The Circle, and Heroes of the Frontier. 7 In heartbreakingly quick succession, Didion then had to write the memoir about her daughter’s death. In 2011 she published Blue Nights, which told the painfully unbelievable story of the now-married daughter’s enervating illness and death.

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Suggested Further Reading Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan, 2007. Huber, Irmtraud. Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Savvas, Theophilus. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

7 “9/11” AS INSISTENT GAME-CHANGER

Americans were getting rich in Wall Street’s booming technology markets.Y2K had not decimated electronic grids, as techies had feared. There was no reason not to buy a new house, or to become a day trader, or to try one’s hand at making movies. Whatever cusp the turn-into-the-century had found, balancing on the ridges of prosperity and denying any threat of loss, the United States seemed invincible. Less globally aware than it was to become, the United States reveled in its prosperity and seemed to forget what should have been seen as warning signs: in 1998, American embassies in both Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania were bombed. The death toll in Kenya was 213, and the injured were counted in thousands. More than 150 people were blinded by flying glass. Followed in only minutes was the blast in Tanzania, killing 11 and wounding 85. Then in October, 2000, the ship the USS Cole experienced a suicide attack by two al Qaeda operatives in a fishing skiff, leaving 17 sailors dead. A new anti-terrorism office was instituted, so that the United States secret services were no longer separated. Hopefully, this use of combined resources would enable the United States to be more adequately prepared. Whether or not such a change could have stopped the efforts of bin Laden, who had vowed to “bleed” the United States of its finances and its people, the stealth attack on the morning of September 11, 2001, destroyed forever the myth of American preparedness. The memory of the crumbling buildings and the recognition of the 3,000 dead would never be erased: catastrophic, mind-numbing, the attacks by the nineteen terrorists on the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and the White House (the latter preempted by the bravery of innocent passengers on board the plane, passengers determined to stop the terrorist attack) spoke to a deep and lasting chaos. Americans would not forget the terrorist attacks that had moved, successfully, into the heart of their country.They would not forget the thousands of deaths or the trauma of the unexpected invasion. Their knowledge was also visual,

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because millions watched the attacks on television, unaware of what was happening. In the words of poet William Heyen, who edited one of the first commemorative collections, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, at 8:45 a.m., a passenger jet from Boston crashed into the 110 story North Tower of the World Trade Center; at 9:03 a.m. another plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center; at 9:43 a.m. another plane decimated the Pentagon; at 9:50 the South Tower totally collapsed; at l0:29, the North Tower collapsed, and sometime between 9:50 and 10:20, a fourth plane was taken down—all on board dead—in Somerset County, southeast of Pittsburgh . . . the disaster created 16 vertical acres of people and buildings in smoking ruins . . . burning for days.1 Perhaps more important than the data was Heyen’s deeply felt comment that the “trauma of the day would abide, soul-deep.” As poet Aliki Barnstone echoed, “For me, consciousness itself changed on September 11.” It was not only Toni Morrison who admitted that she had no words to use in describing the enormity of the attacks, the millions of viewers who played and replayed the television coverage, coverage augmented by print stories, audio, and social media journalism, and worldwide reproductions. Indelibly inscribed in these millions of minds was not only the crumbling and crashing of those fire-destroyed towers but of the human figures trying to escape the firestorms of those upper floors. One of the pervasive images used to describe the havoc of 9/11 became that of falling—the falling of people’s bodies, of the towers themselves, of the ashy debris that shrouded the New York streets for weeks. The shock of those trapped human beings choosing to die in the air, in flight as it were, brought home the individualized and individualizing tragedies that lived long after the attack. Wayne Dodd’s “The Third Tower” concludes, Falling forever out of the future. Falling into memory, into absence. . . . Planes, people, towers—falling before our very eyes. . . Similarly, Gail Griffin’s fifth poem in her “How It Comes” includes this evocative scene: He calls them jumpers. I came out of the subway, he writes, and saw body parts. On the sidewalk across the street there was a jumper. Like every kid I dreamed I could fly. One day I stood at the top of the stairs, the dream still so real I felt myself do it, leap out brightly . . .

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Another pervasive image is that of the ash, the destroyed wood, paper, skin, permeating all tensile surfaces. Kimiko Hahn includes a couplet in her long poem sequence: Day ten, after days of sun and two of rain, the soles of the rescue workers’ boots melt on the still feverish metal wreckage . . . That the fires of the wreckage burned for a hundred days meant little at the time of the attack, but for the thousands of responders over the autumn, the smoldering, still immense piles of concrete fragments and dead bodies and lives took on their own tragic eeriness. John Updike’s matter-of-fact prose gives a deep irony to this sentient loss: as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the South Tower dropped from the screen of our viewing. It fell straight down like an elevator, like a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion, distinct across the mile of air. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling. The nightmare is still on. The bodies are beneath the rubble, the last-minute cell phone calls—remarkably calm and loving, many of them—are still being reported. Edwina Seaver’s phrase in “Reconciliation” is “victims of the terrible day were crushed or vaporized” and then “disappeared into its story.” For Terry Tempest Williams. as well. the metaphor of story helps to ameliorate the atrocities that the day brought. This is her inchoate prose poem, titled simply “II”: We watch the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center struck by our own planes, then collapse under the weight of terror. 110 stories. Thousands of life stories. Gone. Collapsed dreams. Compressed sorrows. Shattered innocence. Blood. They say what they need most from us now is blood. In Samuel Hazo’s prose comes a codification of those images: The reaction of most people to the carefully planned and executed destruction of the World Trade Center and one section of the Pentagon—after the first shock had passed—was to call those they loved or to leave work and hurry to be with them. These, of course, are two of the most primordial instincts in human nature, and they have been expressed in literature since the age of Homer. What is The Odyssey, for example, but the saga of a man who yearns to be home with

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his family? . . . The consequences of September 11, 2001, have come to involve criminal investigations, war-plans, psychological insights, politics of all sorts, a renewed domestic interest in the possessions of firearms, religious services and discussions, apocalyptic warnings, the public display of flags. . . . But the human reaction to the first shock of recognition transcends everything. It was at that instant that our souls were speared, and we lived thereafter with our wounds. . . . The only language was poetry or silence. From the initial loss of language (nobody could have foreseen having to have words to express such devastation), to a slow expression of one or another of the elements that seemed most poignant, language started to inscribe and reinscribe both the losses and the events. At first, there seemed to be no way to assess what those losses were. The death count was projected to be much higher than it was. Figured in were hundreds of deaths of the first responders, drawn from the entire United States. In illustration, in another segment of the Kimiko Hahn poem, she writes, “Taped to every lamppost on every corner are missing person photos of the dead—6,965 to date. And after a thunder shower, fresh fliers appear as if from nowhere.” Hahn’s poem also describes “photographs of mail clerks, research analysts, waiters—and I cannot imagine/trying to locate a beloved/with saliva from an old toothbrush,/zip-locked and tucked in a handbag.” Similarly, “Messages from the Sky,” a poem by Fred Moramarco, lists the words retrieved from answering machines, sent from the planes, the powers, the people who knew they were, at least temporarily, survivors. Years after 9/11, journalists were thinking back to what that scarifying time was like. It seemed as if words used retrospectively had more definition, more direct aim. As Stephen Marche wrote in “Are Things Getting a Little Violent?” as he thinks about Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. . . . That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” The writer then speaks in his voice, This kind of mayhem may be ancient—it may even be permanent in the human condition—but it’s new to America. With September 11, Americans’ basic political myth of liberation and purification through violence shattered. That day was an encounter with violence not in the hinterland, as in the Mexican War or the Wild West, not a liberating violence, as in the Revolution or the Civil War, but blind, pointless, utter mayhem. The war in Iraq, so often compared to World War II or Vietnam, depending on who’s doing the comparing, has no accurate precedent in American experience. It has been a long, horrific lesson that the mayhem is within us as well as beyond us. Americans torturing innocents at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Terrorists training children as young as nine to be suicide bombers. And for what? The mayhem is foundationless and cornucopian. There’s no bottom to it, and there’s no top to it. (Marche Esquire 39)

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Frank Rich’s November 9, 2008, New York Times column linked the immediate years after 9/11 with the United States having been held “hostage” in a kind of vise of political correctness: he finds that post 9/11 America has been in shell shock, “when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of patriotism.” Feeling that the election of Barack Obama might bring change, Rich continued, “What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on. That’s not who we are” (Rich Times 9). For James Fallows, Rich’s assessment is familiar. Fallows’s Atlantic essay had presented another kind of in-depth assessment of America in those recuperative years that followed 9/11: the 9/11 era was both transitory and permanent. The political moment in which the United States could have done anything to address basic problems—notably, reliance on imported oil, which then cost about $25 a barrel—was gone within six months. Other consequences of 9/11 will stay with us. It is hard to imagine when airline travel will be “normal” again, or when no American troops will serve in Iraq.//For several years after the attacks, saying that a policy or idea reflected “pre-9/11 thinking” could end the discussion. But by 2005, some people, mainly academics, began arguing carefully that too much alarm over possible terrorism could be selfdefeating. They said that 9/11 was a moment of unprecedented shock for America but did not overturn every previous principle of how the United States should deal with other nations or preserve its own liberties. (Fallows Atlantic 82) These retrospective views differ considerably from those expressed soon after the attack. Perhaps surprisingly, there was little talk about the motivation for the attacks and their politics. Even though silence is not a neutral act, certain segments of the United States populations were remaining silent—it was enough to grieve what were irreparable losses. As the United States came to more assurance about the attacks, the attackers, and the politics of 9/11, the quietness of grieving gave way to questioning and then to depictions that would help to inscribe September 11, 2001, in United States history. Given that early language had been expressed in short prose pieces and in poetry, the next decade of American writing would be focused on the memoirs and novels that often—whether obviously or in more subtle ways—would include the World Trade Center attacks. As critic Maurizio Ascari wrote recently, “The terror attacks of 9/11 are at the root of a new form of cultural industry.” He specifies, 9/11 is unequivocally at the root of another fictional trend, which critics have labeled as the 9/11 novel or post-9/11 novel. Some of these books deal directly

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with the terrorist attacks on New York. . . . Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). . . . Others revisit the attacks tangentially, without explicitly mentioning them. Suffice it to think of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). (Ascari Global 23–24)2 The list of “relevant” novels written by American fiction writers did not diminish after the several years mentioned in this critical commentary, proving in some respects that Chris Cleave’s comments about the permanence of the World Trade Center attack in the imaginations of writers, or perhaps as a rooted cause in their personal imaginaries, must be recognized. Even though few of the novels that centered on 9/11 which have been published during the fifteen years from 2002 to the present have been prize winners, nearly all of them have been well reviewed, scrutinized as significant, and related to others with the same general focus. Such an interest is not puzzling since most readers, and writers, are students of history. Sometimes readers tend to devalue the most recent historical events because of familiarity; again, revisiting those events brings a different kind of urgency to existing memories. In retrospect, it seemed that many American novels between 2006 and 2010 focused on 9/11. In some cases, it took writers a long time to codify, and then to open, both their memories and their ideas. Still, most writers, like most Americans, experience some stress as they cope or try to cope with the lingering effects of 9/11. Writers write, in part, to quiet these seemingly indelible memories, to make of them something changed and permanent, something of art, something else. They also, of course, do not want to falsify the truth as they saw it and knew it, so to honor the reality they sometimes turn to metaphor as a figurative way of leading the reader to truth without overwhelming him or her with it. The writer’s dilemma is that, on the one hand, readers don’t want to reimagine 9/11. (Why would we read John Updike’s novel called Terrorist when we want to continue to hate our perception of a terrorist? That Updike had instead drawn a complex picture of a teenaged outsider, susceptible to the political traps of serving his family’s people in the midst of United States suburban culture, saved the novel— and made it a best-seller, despite all the readers who didn’t want to read any book with that title.) Another problem with writing about 9/11 is that readers still carry unbelievable images from television screens: any fiction would have to include those images, or the reader would consider the story false.We must face the fact that America’s viewing of the inexplicably falling towers, especially just after the first plane’s attack, when no one knew whether it was accident or intent, created visions that have become synonymous with disaster, along with the bleak recognition that the United States was in real, death-dealing danger. The falling World Trade Center towers, like the falling bodies, both became immediately recognizable as metaphors of the United States under siege. No reader needed to be from New York to feel that experience in all its sudden, inescapable horror.

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Don DeLillo’s 2007 Falling Man is a 9/11 novel, but its title does not simply refer to people choosing to jump from the World Trade Center tower windows.There is, ironically, a professional “falling man” in the novel. After 9/11 he becomes something of a folk hero because he travels the city with his equipment, organized by his helper brother, an engineer, so that he may fall, precipitously, without a net.This falling man plays no part in the narrative, which is the story of Keith Neudecker, a New York lawyer who escapes the first tower’s destruction by walking down countless flights of stairs and walking home, even though “There was glass in his hair and face, marbled boils of blood and light.” The novel opens in a post-explosion scene: It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He [Keith] was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars. The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets of cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. ( Falling Man 3) “Otherworldly,” DeLillo emphasizes. One pervasive quality of these 9/11 novels is the unreality of their space. Almost like a fantasy, the solemnity of the ashy destruction changes the world every observer thought he or she knew. Keith manages to find a ride to his wife and son’s house, though he has been separated from Lianne for some time. Part I of this three-part novel is titled “Bill Lawton,” the name Keith’s young son associates with the terrorist attack. Justin hears that America is searching for “Bill Lawton” rather than bin Laden, and he and his middle-school friends stand guard at their condo windows, armed with his dad’s binoculars. Keith and Lianne become a family once more, but Lianne still envies her dying mother, whose long affair with the German Ernst Hechinger (a man of suspicious history—a Nazi? A criminal?) sheds no light on 9/11. Her mother tells Lianne that she knows very little about “Martin,” the name her lover chooses to use. When Martin stops visiting her mother, as her illness progresses, Lianne does not judge him; she still finds this enigma of a beloved who is essentially unknown interesting. Part II of Falling Man is entitled “Ernst Hechinger.” Part III is titled “David Janick,” the name of the 39-year-old professional falling man, who dies as he enacts one of his performance pieces, his real name still unknown for all his celebrity as the “falling man.” This section, and the narrative of Keith and Lianne Neudecker, ends with a circle back to the beginning of the 9/11

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attack, when the first plane hits the tower and Keith regains consciousness to find his best friend Rumsey dying beside him. Keith then sees the body-strewn office surrounding him, picks up the briefcase that is not his, and begins his seemingly endless walk down the tower steps. There is more.There is Hammad, a terrorist; there is Florence Givens, who owns the briefcase; there is the relentless crumbling of several other lives as the effects of 9/11 take their toll. In other novels similarly focused on 9/11, there are replications of what DeLillo achieves, traits that have been described here: 1. These books create a surreal atmosphere, a sense of place that becomes fantastic. 2. The post-9/11 world is in fragments. The structure of these books echoes that fragmentation. “Plots” occur in pieces whether or not the general impression of the work is postmodern—in this case, theme determines structure to an unprecedented degree. Keith’s “story” seems to be caught in the whirl of his damaged mind, still shaken from the events of 9/11. 3. Human behavior itself seems surreal, almost robotlike. Nobody judges anyone else. 4. Within the narrative, information is given without judgment. Who is a good character? Who is evil? There are two segments of Falling Man in particular that illustrate this suspension of morality. The first is the passionate affair that develops when Keith returns the briefcase to its owner, a woman of color who has also escaped death in the towers. Florence tells him that she “was dazed and had no sense of time,” that she wanted to repeatedly tell him her story. After several meetings, and sexual intimacies, she confessed to Keith, “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?” His reply is, only, “I saved your briefcase.” The intimacy of the story of their survival, separately, as told to each other, has constituted a greater intimacy than their having sex. 5. The second even more dramatic episode that illustrates this suspension of the real (in the 9/11 circumstances) is DeLillo’s introduction of Hammad, the terrorist. He is aboard the first plane as it crashes into the tower. He first appears in Hamburg, Germany, at the end of Book I; at the end of Book II he is in Florida, discouraged that he cannot learn to fly planes, questioning his life plan. At the end of Book III, and the end of the novel, he sits, bleeding from an injury, on the plane itself, and the “he” that refers to him then segues into the “he” that refers to Keith in his tower office. This is DeLillo’s concluding passage: There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come. . . . He (Hammad) began to vibrate. He wasn’t sure whether it was the motion of the plane or only himself. Something fell off the counter in the galley. He fastened his seatbelt. A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one

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way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor. ( Falling Man 239) Falling Man then continues with Keith’s escape down the stairs, into the street, back to the start of the book. An important point about the commonalities of this group of 9/11 novels, then, would be the absence of any omniscient narrator, or even of a trustworthy observer. In these texts, any observer who exists would represent an arational, an illogical mind. Just as the writer chooses to draw an arational setting, so any perspective that remains would be a damaged one. The very method of the novel seems to emphasize that no recognizable order exists after the events of 9/11. When Andre Dubus III wrote The Garden of Last Days (2008), he was eager to use the specifics of the terrorists’ training; he spent time in the areas of Florida that the terrorists had occupied. Marked to be the classic 9/11 novel, this book features as lead character Bassam, one of the terrorists from the first plane. After the book’s publication, Dubus had explained that he was more interested in the mother’s love for her child, even though she had to be employed as a sex worker, than he was in the participants of 9/11. Set in Bradenton and Tampa, Florida, coastal areas that had been useful to the terrorists as they trained, The Garden of Last Days has as primary action the kidnapping of April’s 3-year-old daughter, Franny. The action seems perverse—Dubus makes use of continuous interruptions to the Bassam story, and eventually the reader cares only about finding Franny. Here the 9/11 events contribute to a kind of mock narrative. By the end of the novel, as Bassam returns to Boston and lets his opinion of education be known as he reads in the Harvard library, his intolerance for the Western privileging of knowledge over the religious matters that govern his existence is forceful: the reader cares less and less about Bassam. What counts, as Dubus has written his novel, is that Franny has been found and is returned to April. At that point the terrorists board their plane. Critic Marni Gauthier makes the point that novels about 9/11 do not follow any postmodern patterns. They share some of the postmodern tactics—fragmentation of events, self-consciousness of effect—but they are much more likely to avoid humor or impersonality. Instead, Gauthier notes, fiction written about, or after, 9/11 is likely to tread “an appreciably human psychological and emotional territory.” The mechanics of postmodern techniques are less apparent: in this critic’s assessment, the happenings of 9/11 have created a new field of fictional energy. Writers are motivated by what she calls “a new form of truth-telling” in their art (Gauthier Amnesia 151–52). Gauthier’s contextualization makes sense in explaining the praise that greeted Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2005. Had

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he not published the novel about his grandfather’s experiences in the Holocaust— his 2002 Everything Is Illuminated—which used a new methodology of evoking pain without sentimentalizing it, readers might not have found his narrative about 9-year-old Oskar Schell caught in the debacle of 9/11, despairingly searching for his father and, in effect, his ancestry, so moving.3 Parts of this 2005 novel are narratively gripping. When Oskar finds the envelope marked “Black,” referring—he assumes—to some unknown family, he scours the neighborhood to discover their identity. He is fascinated by the key inside the envelope, just as he is fascinated by his quest to discover his heritage. Thematically, in Oskar’s innocence, Foer establishes a pattern of “us” and “them,” suggesting that some identities can join together whereas others cannot. That Foer makes readers return to both Dresden and Hiroshima makes trauma and loss occupy the emotional center of the novel. One of the first novels published after 9/11, about 9/11, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was instrumental in making readers see how far-reaching would be the effects of trauma. As Amy Hungerford wrote in her appreciative essay about Foer, he uses his writer’s skills to fuse “the connections among family story, sentimental investments, and publishing story”—and she adds, “same enough and different enough, both familiar and fresh” (Hungerford Now 134). For Samuel Coale,Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) bears some resemblance to 9/11 novels, or at least it is a work marked by its author’s usual defiance whenever tradition comes into play. Drawing from the Colorado Mine Wars, with overtones of sympathy for any counterculture elements, Pynchon’s long and fulsome novel also pits women against men, making gender an unusual consideration in choices of pilots who fly aircraft. Coale refers to Against the Day as a “splintered, fragmented, and seemingly endless narrative,” marked by the fact that anything that might appear to be symmetrical gets modified. And he notes that the “torturous tale” ends with the defeat of the very people the reader has been siding with. Interesting in that the novel goes back to begin with the Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition, in 1893, Against the Day is packed with empty Hollywood sets, silent film stars, Nikolai Tesla, Groucho Marx, Bella Lugosi, Mexican vacations, and, surprisingly, hydrogen skyships. One of those ships, that captained by Penelope (“Penny”) Black, is filled with pregnant crew members, whereas the male crew that services the skyship named Inconvenience seems only bewildered by its assignment—and by the competing female crew. Coale does not specify which elements he thinks point to the devastation of the Twin Towers, but he does mention the parallel destruction in St. Mark’s Square, as well as the crew members’ reliance on seemingly unreadable maps, maps that lead nowhere (Coale Quirks 178–80).4 A 9/11 novel that was not much discussed in any review media is Paul Auster’s 2008 Man in the Dark. Auster creates no terrorist figure at all, and the novel has very little chronology except the order of its storying. Here, 9/11 has never happened. Instead, after the 2000 elections, the country underwent a civil war, and what remains of the United States is divided into camps of secrecy, with agents

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becoming double agents on every page. (Auster’s Man in the Dark shares some of the bleak qualifies of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the stark parable of a man and his son in a postapocalyptic land, struggling not for ideology but for another hour of life.) In the Auster novel, Augustus Brill—suffering from both his wife’s death and his bodily trauma of a recent car crash—creates a continuing story through his pained and sleepless nights. He is being cared for by Miriam, his only child, recently divorced, and his granddaughter, Katya, a dropout from film school with whom he watches old movies most of each day. Each of Auster’s characters is, truly, displaced, the granddaughter by the visual memory of seeing her fiancé’s beheading by the Iraqi forces that had captured him. Man in the Dark is impossibly fragmented. Its dominant plot is August Brill’s belief that an assassin, Owen Brick, is hunting for him. The macabre political plot that Brick figures in is, of course, fantasy. Once he kills August Brill, life will revert to normalcy again. Part of Man in the Dark is the author’s humorous commentary on the act of writing.While Brill thinks about his creation of story, admitting that he tells himself stories because “they prevent me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget,” he starts the tale of Owen Brick with this paragraph: I put him in a hole. That felt like a good start, a promising way to get things going. Put a sleeping man in a hole, and then see what happens when he wakes up and tries to crawl out. I’m talking about a deep hole in the ground, 9 or l0 feet deep, dug in such a way as to form a perfect circle, with sheer inner walls of dense, tight packed earth, so hard that the surfaces have the texture of baked clay, perhaps even glass. . . . In other words, the man in the hole will be unable to extricate himself from the hole once he opens his eyes. (Auster Man 2) In Auster’s spare prose, this description—remember, of a complete fantasy—takes on a sense of comedy in the expansion of detail. Much of the assassination plot works similarly, with the reader’s becoming concerned about how the imaginary character, Owen Brick, will kill Brill. The novel, however, ends with a set of scenes as detailed as was this imaginary one; these, however, are about the reality of Katya’s beheaded lover Titus.There is nothing comic about the perfectly proportioned balance of the book: fantasy giving way to the horror of politically motivated death, described in the very detail the reader prays to avoid hearing. Instead, the reader must watch the beheading. Auster’s writing brooks no avoidance. He deftly leads his readers to think August Brill’s old age has entrapped his mind. But the true impact of people’s fantasies, and realities, coming as they do after the grim reality of 9/11, cannot be erased. Instead, Man in the Dark becomes a salient metaphor for the very human nature so traumatized by 9/11. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is another 2008 novel, with seemingly few connections to 9/11. The narrative begins after the event and seldom mentions it, except

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that the miasma of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers has poisoned New York and its people. Undergirded by grief, the human quotient of the greatest American city functions minimally: therefore, O’Neill’s ostensible plot, which concerns forming a sports team, shows men working through their animosity to reach friendship. The story begins in 2002, after Hans van den Brock, a Dutch banker, has separated from his wife and son. Rachel, his wife, fears going to her New York law office and so has returned to London. In her absence, Hans takes up cricket and is befriended by Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian with grand ambitions (among those, to build a cricket stadium in New York City). O’Neill’s simple plot weaves these migrant characters into a tapestry of displaced men, ambitions, and aims. When Chuck Ramkissoon’s murdered body is found in the Gowanus Canal behind a Home Depot store, several years after his death, the culture of polyglot New York neither remembers or questions. It seems to be ironically suitable that this slight story of Hans joining the cricket club, as the only white member among the other players from Guyana, Jamaica, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, and Trinidad, is written by the Irish Joseph O’Neill, a man educated in Holland and England and affected—as was the world—by the events of 9/11 in New York. It is less suitable but perhaps necessary so that this author can convey the deep irony of anyone’s valueless life that Ramkissoon’s body lies in the canal for two years unnoticed and unclaimed. Susan Choi’s 2008 A Person of Interest also draws a frightening silhouette of post-9/11 culture, rampant with suspicions of “foreigners” and their origins. In Netherland, the fact that skin color matters in the twenty-first century in ways earlier immigrants might not have recognized is unquestioned. In A Person of Interest, the Asian-born Professor Lee, a mathematician employed by a small university, is so unconcerned with social propriety that he chooses not to attend the memorial service for Hendley, his fellow teacher, killed by a bomb in their office building. Suspicion grows—Lee’s arbitrary choice suggests that he sent the bomb. Choi’s novel shows the pursuit of Professor Lee as endemic to suspicion of foreigners: a grim narrative which, happily, turns out to exonerate the Asian man. A Person of Interest is one of the few 9/11 novels that has a happy ending, however. Much of the other fiction that can be grouped under this rubric is so damaged by the waste of the terrorist effort, or so spun out of normalcy by grieving human characters, that any positive resolution would seem contrived. In Ellen Gilchrist’s 2008 A Dangerous Age, she concentrates on the impact of 9/11 on families, and Southern families, at that. The two daughters of the Hand family, along with their cousin, are all bereaved by the destruction of the terrorist attack. Winifred’s fiancé was killed in the New York attack, weeks before their wedding. Gilchrist’s prose resembles that of Auster in its terse effects: here, Winifred announces, “Except the wedding never took place because Charles Kane perished on September 11, 2001, along with three thousand other perfectly lovely, helpless human beings.”

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In Gilchrist’s fictional world, however, hope remains. The novel ends four years after 9/11, when Olivia’s baby is born August 25, 2006.The novel moves from tragedy to rebirth, from the conventional South to Oklahoma’s Native American land. Olivia, part Cherokee, edits a Tulsa newspaper and remains focused on world affairs. Her full-blood Cherokee husband, Bobby Tree, after serving four years in Iraq, goes as a National Guardsman to that country to do technical duty and is killed driving in (in an armored car) from the airport. Olivia carries his son. War impacts the Hand sisters as well, bringing them each husbands in lieu of their lost 9/11 partners. Gilchrist does not try to disguise the damage that 9/11 did, but she shows the resilience and the ability to leave convention behind, effortlessly, for the three Hand women. The tone of A Dangerous Age differs remarkably from the novels of 9/11 discussed earlier; if Gilchrist’s women characters are marked, and marred, permanently by the loss of their men, their resulting condition is not her primary emphasis. It is more that she uses 9/11 to bring war per se into the very conventional lives of the Hands. Sue Miller’s 2010 The Lake Shore Limited also focuses on the shattered life of a strong woman character. The result strikes the reader as highly plotted (and highly fictionalized). Billy Gertz, the playwright who has written a play about an imagined terrorist event, attacking the train of the title as it pulls into Chicago’s Union Station, is working through the loss of her friends in 9/11; she had waited anguishing days to discover whether her lover, Gus, still lived. Miller’s use of named narrative segments creates a drama from Billy’s remembered pain: her replication of theatrical techniques enriches the slight plot, that Billy will find a new love and will be intent on salvaging her formerly embittered life. For the other characters in Miller’s novel, the narrative focus on producing Billy’s play helps to bring their lives into alignment with that of the playwright. Miller writes a recovery narrative. For Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, 2006, the terrorist attack is far in the past. She focuses on recent East Coast college graduates, feeling themselves mature but behaving erratically—the reader is asked to question, is this age or is this a kind of fall-out? As Messud explores the several families of her lead characters, in addition to the characters themselves, the reader sees developing a kind of group sensibility. Financial privilege does not often provide answers to deciding which professional path is essential. Instead, Messud’s interest in the first work experiences of this cast of characters seemingly deflects reader attention from 9/11. Only for the least conventional of her protagonists does 9/11 still have an impact, and he, accordingly, chooses to leave New York. When Chang-rae Lee undertook his unlikely fourth novel, titled The Surrendered, his topic surprised his usual readers. Although the novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 2011, it was remarkably unlike Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), or Aloft (2004). Whereas much of Lee’s early fiction dealt with Korean-American immigrants, trying to assimilate (or not assimilate) during modern times, The Surrendered moved back in time to place characters in the midst of Japanese-occupied Manchuria during the 1930s, to Korea in the 1950s, and then to

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New York and Italy in the 1980s. Critic Amanda Page calls The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize, “a historical war epic” (Page Understanding 71).Whether or not Lee was fascinated by the decades of war during the twentieth century, or whether he admired the canvas of strong characters he saw himself creating, or whether he was indirectly catching up to the terrible bereavement that marked the East Coast of the United States after 9/11, he drew a passionately inspired canvas of both the military, the people caught in the war, and the survivors. As readers become familiar with the characters of Hector, Sylvia, and the most complicated of all, the child June, Lee’s diligent portrayals present trauma writ large in every character. The continuous struggle on June’s part to survive, even as she has been “surrendered,” leaves her depleted and, often, joyless. But June does continue to face what life brings her, forgetting much of life’s pleasures in her fight to stay alive. In many ways, Jonathan Franzen also uses an indirect approach to 9/11. His second major novel, Freedom, published in 2010, differs appreciably from his first, prize-winning The Connections, 2001. In his account of the long-married Minnesota couple Walter and Patty Berglund, Franzen analyzes Whole Foods, commercialism, and suburban gentrification: his novel seems almost devoid of political or global interest. The Berglands are a genuinely modest couple whose connection to the real world is the CBS Evening News. The Berglund’s two teenage children are the heart of the novel, and in Joey’s unrest lies the 9/11 plotline. Joey dismisses the television coverage of the World Trade Center attacks: unlike his roommate, he goes to class. For weeks after 9/11 Joey “could not recall what he’d been thinking as he crossed the semi-deserted campus.” But, to reveal part of the boy’s confused character, Franzen says directly that his selfish attitude was “part of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks.” Franzen adds, whereas Joey had considered himself lucky to go to college, he saw now that his whole school experience would be blighted by 9/11. Franzen describes the omnipresent ennui and recurring fear common to survivors: In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason; it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over; it was stupid that the Chi Psi boys hung a banner of  “support” from their house; it was stupid that the football game against Penn State was canceled (Franzen Freedom 233). In other sections of the book, Franzen speaking as Joey notes the fairy-tale quality of the rumors flooding the campus: no Jews had been killed on 9/11, just as there had been no Jews in the Twin Towers.These episodes turn much of the action in Freedom back to the parents, whose previously isolated lives now grew restive: change was everywhere. As Freedom shows, not all change was positive. And as Franzen’s choices as he wrote this novel also showed, not all emphases fed directly into the reader’s concept of what the dynamics of 9/11 were or would be seen to be in the future. Considering these novels collectively, which may not do justice to individual books, one realizes the common critique—that no matter how skillfully written, they tend to deflect the reader’s attention from 9/11 itself. Using DeLillo’s Falling Man to build a kind of defense against that somewhat amorphous objection, let

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me point out that few writers have had the experience of writing fiction about an all-too-real event and yet are circumscribed by the necessity NOT to draw from that reality. No novelist has the right to erase any segments of those events; he or she can only filter them through authorial consciousness. Returning to Falling Man means looking closely at the ways in which DeLillo attempts to portray Keith, as the protagonist of the Twin Towers attack. Many scenes throughout the novel depict Keith as he remembers playing poker with his successful New York friends. These segments are set against Lianne’s professional activities—she works with patients who are experiencing dementia. As DeLillo sets up his alternating foci, the novel becomes a kind of memory play and the memories themselves (especially those recorded by her patients in their journals) help to complete the events that both Lianne and Keith experience. DeLillo constantly emphasizes absence, the absence of friends, of activities, of the existence of the missing 3,000 lost to 9/11. Images throughout the book remind the reader of this pattern, even though absences are variously denied by the middle-schoolers in their sleuthing episodes. Keith’s reveries center on the missing towers and missing people (two dead and a third suffering his life away in the burn unit), Lianne’s focus on her father who has killed himself, as well as the myriad of her patients—whose dementia is often expressed through lost memories. All these losses are caught in the pervasive metaphor, not of the falling towers and the falling people, but of Lianne’s picking up the laundry early on 9/11, all emotion caught in the tactile body of a clean men’s shirt. When Keith enters the apartment after his scarifying run from the towers, he tells Lianne, “there was a shirt coming down from the sky.” With the enormity of what he has just lived through, this detail is meant to signal his perturbed state of mind. The novel similarly ends with a repetition of Keith’s memory of the falling shirt, substituted here for the falling bodies and the falling towers, and the novel ends, “Then he saw a shirt come down from the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.”  The metonymy of the shirt both brings the reader back to the initial (but still absent) scene of the destruction itself and also reinforces the fragility of not only buildings but of human memories, the consciousness of what a human mind can admit to knowing. One common complaint about these, and other, 9/11 novels has been that they deflect readers’ attention from the event of the terrorist attacks themselves. None of the books discussed in this brief section has been a prizewinner; one has been filmed and some have been optioned. Even as critics recognize novels about 9/11 as a subgenre, few of these books has brought great wealth to respective authors. To close this brief summary of fiction relating to 9/11, these observations might be useful: 1. The terrorists, if they appear in the works at all, are only vaguely described and named. They are said to be from the Middle East rather than any specific country. They are identified as non-Christian, but they are not identified as Muslim.

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2. If the terrorists appear, they are young, sometimes naïve.This is Dubus’ forte in The Garden of Last Days—Bassam’s possible vacillation, his yearning for experience, centers his description. By the author’s emphasizing the scene of the three terrorists going through security at Boston’s Logan airport, he gives the reader hope that one of the guards will spot the knives, that something will prevent the attack. Updike also uses this method to handle the act of terrorism in Terrorist: it simply does not happen. 3. In some of these novels, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks is only fear. Sometimes disguised as political correctness or as suspicion of all things foreign, the attitudes of fearfulness come to dominate the American persona. Susan Choi’s portrait of the Asian-born mathematician in A Person of Interest shows this suspicion-mongering at its worst: a man’s life is nearly ruined because he seems not to grieve the death of a colleague. Paul Auster’s fantasy assassination plot stems from the same ungovernable fear and the fact that Chuck Ramkissoon’s body is not found for two years shows the intensity of a fear that cannot effectively search for a missing person, especially a person of color.

Notes 1 This and the next half dozen quotations are taken from Heyen September 11, 2001 x, 35, 103, 161, 345, 411, and 80. 2 As part of his argument, Ascari quotes from Chris Cleave’s New York Times essay: It is as if the expectations of books have risen after September 11. The world today is to the pre-September 11 world what falling glass shards are to a window, and the job of a novelist is to describe the new view through those glittering fragments.Yet somehow we expect writers, while they be at it, to show us how to glue the window back together: to give us meaning, hope, and even happy endings. It is extremely demanding & incredibly unfair. 3 In discussing Everything Is Illuminated, for example, Janet Maslin writes about Foer’s ability to describe “the act of remembering as a kind of prayer. That is what it becomes here, for all the book’s wild flights of fancy and its irresistible humor.” Foer’s first novel ends with deaths, whereas his second starts with the overwhelming charting of deaths in 9/11. One might suggest that these two books be read as an A and B compendium of the human legacy of remembered, and remembered with a kind of permanence, sorrow. 4 Coale compares the way Pynchon uses “history” with the way DeLillo deconstructed Kennedy’s assassination in his novel Libra and the Cold War in his novel Underworld (Coale Quirks 191).

Suggested Further Reading Hogue, W. Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Hume, Kathryn. American Dream American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: United States Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Kocela, Christopher. Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

8 POSTMODERN WRITERS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The dynamics of tracing the original postmodern impetus in the craft of American fiction is as convoluted as the individual careers of the authors we associate with the movement. Random associations, such as David Cowart worked through to build his generational strata of relationships, continue to be a promising route to understanding these relationships: did Don DeLillo stop admiring the writing of Thomas Pynchon? Has anyone in the United States run down the most recent fiction of Gil Sorrentino or, for that matter, of Rachel Ingalls? Is there no recourse in considering American postmodernism in 2018 but to return to the 1960s principles and see whether or not writers such as Robert Coover, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon are still being guided by those ideas? Following the death in 2017 of William H. Gass, must a twenty-first-century language philosopher recreate some of those early established ideas? Should an interested reader, half a century later, still be looking for those seminal qualities—“self-reflexivity, tonal ambiguity, generic hybridity, and intertextuality”? (Brauner Contemporary 19). After nearly twenty years of thinking of American literature as a twentyfirst-century product, one might also question the origins of the critical history of postmodernism. Twenty years after the first uses of the term, as Lance Olsen recollects, postmodernism still had little identity. As Olsen writes, “it is less important whether or not postmodernism in fact exists (in what way, after all, can romanticism or Victorianism be said to exist save as a shorthand for a series of more or less shared concerns and techniques) than whether or not we as a culture feel the need to assert that postmodernism exists.” This critic’s specific example is telling, I think, and takes readers back to the era when the “postmodern” was not only exotic but also somewhat frightening. Olsen’s essay continues: “what should be of much interest to us all is that on 22 June 1986 the New York Times Book Review ran a front-page essay by Denis Donoghue called

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“The Promiscuous Cost of Postmodernism.” What is dazzling about this event is that one of the most popular newspapers of the literary establishment decided to say it too had seen the unicorn and had decided to pass on the Word to its general readership. Granted, Donoghue’s tone is often cranky (“I thought we had finished with these matters, but I see they are still on every academic agenda,” he begins (1) and he adds nothing new by way of insight or definition (“The art of postmodernism is chiefly characterized by the elegance of its pastiche,” he claims (37), simply and incompletely echoing one of the central ideas in Fredric Jameson’s seminal 1982 essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”). Nonetheless, with the appearance of his essay the culture at large suddenly acknowledged, if not wholly endorsed, the concept of the postmodern. Suddenly, a group of academics no longer must apologize when they use the term. Olsen’s self-consciousness surfaces in the latter part of his essay: What is also dazzling about the appearance of Donoghue’s piece is that it is as much a register of an omega as of an alpha.Taking the avant-garde into the establishment is to begin to traditionalize the avant-garde, to stabilize a way of thinking whose essence is destabilization. As soon as we have agreed upon a term, a menu, a system of conventions for the postmodern—and it appears that in some ways as a culture we already have or are, at least, well on our way to doing so—petrifaction has begun. . . . As Walter Abish said recently when I asked him if he still placed himself in the company of the postmodern: “What is postmodern anymore? What is experimental? The word has lost its meaning.” . . . After such an observation, it is only a matter of time before our incredibly self-conscious culture attempts to define itself once again, and once again differently. After all, several generations of thinkers and creators have grown up postmodern. (Olsen Circus 24–26) The nostalgia of defining any term that purports to be a minimum of fifty years old can only stretch so far with credibility. To contrast a longing for history, for roots, we need read Madhu Dubey, who warns about the current generation, readers, she says, who “are skeptical about the political value of literature [because] the very technology of print is felt to be obsolete.” This critic acknowledges that today’s culture is, admittedly, “hypervisual” (Dubey Signs 14). Caren Irr takes a middle ground as she discusses the literary force of Dave Eggers, called by some a “one-man zeitgeist,” in that he writes as he thinks, globally. In connection with his varied narratives, often based on oral histories instead of his own selfconscious stories, he works with what Irr calls “expatriate narratives.”1 She traces American writers’ exploration of expatriation from “the Gilded Age tourism of Mark Twain and Henry James, the more openly alienated artists of Ernest Hemingway’s and Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, the post-World War II voluntary

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exile of James Baldwin and Paul Bowles, or Vietnam War era hip travel, then, when the expatriate leaves home to ‘explore other freedoms,’ all the while ‘safely retaining links to his homeland.’ . . . ‘Her description of the benefit of such travel is entirely positive, but she notes in conclusion,’ After all, if the expatriate were to engage fully with others beyond the confines of his self-defined community of aesthetes, he would become a migrant.”  What Irr envisions is a literature that shares the human condition without the self-consciousness of geopolitical borders (Irr Geopolitical 177–79). One means of bringing a sense of a global perspective to an assessment of current American writing is to observe the world’s prizes—Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Bob Dylan, representing a new definition of verbal art, in 2016; Dave Eggers won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2009. In 2017, Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for The Underground Railroad), and that same year George Saunders won the British Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo. These two 2017 prizes honor novels that are expressly American, though perhaps transcendent of national politics and interest. In both The Underground Railroad and Lincoln in the Bardo, the nineteenth-century United States lives again: escaping the imprisonment of slavery motivates both stories. Deftly side-stepping the more obviously blatant political plots for breaking slavery’s hold, Whitehead draws on his earlier novels (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and his New York Trilogy) to vary methods of telling his remarkable story. Nervous about tackling the subject of slavery and admitting he had been planning to write this novel for sixteen years, Whitehead chose Cora as his narrative center—to excellent effect. In the case of George Saunders, honored by the British prize for what is his first novel ever published (in the midst of his many fine short stories and story collections), he too created an intertextual fantasy drawing on earlier times. Lincoln in the Bardo depicts the ghosts that attend Abraham Lincoln in the cemetery just after Willie, his beloved young son who died from typhoid fever, has been buried. Hundreds of speakers, most from the other side, mourn the child, as well as his father’s agonizing grief and that of the tormented country itself, torn apart over the politics of white versus black. There is nothing abstract about Saunders’ representation of grief, and the recording of the speaking voices, set to create harmony with Lincoln’s words themselves, is unlike most audio effects for spoken word presentations. Saunders, in reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo, is called “an experimentalist,” not a “postmodernist,” but the performance of the vocal track for his novel makes it a nonverbal art, a composite, complete with spectral undertones. The honoring of both these works in 2017 supports the belief that American writers never stop being American writers—just as Thomas Pynchon decades ago mined World War II in ways that were not immediately recognizable when he created the intricate Gravity’s Rainbow, so Saunders uses the Civil War, but particularly the character of Lincoln, to contrast operative humanity as he sees it today. As he said in a recent interview, “Today’s politics has changed the landscape. . . . We have been walking around the world but now the world has changed.”

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Of the early postmodern writers considered in this study, only Paul Auster was himself a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. His intricate and weighty 4-3-2-1 was reviewed positively throughout the year and no doubt reminded readers of the heft and substance of the monumental novels so many earlier postmodern writers had written, from John Barth’s epics through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Charismatic in its voicing, Auster’s novel was quite different from the shorter novellas readers had come to expect from him: Man in the Dark was more in line with the three novellas of his New York Trilogy, leaving untold segments of story to represent a reader’s suppositions of character, as well as questioning elements of that character itself. What Auster tackles in the many years he was writing 4-3-2-1 is a four-fold set of characters, all boys born on the same day in 1947 (Auster’s birth year), to a Jewish family (name changed from Reznikoff as the paterfamilias entered the country), intent on succeeding in New York City. Running for 866 pages, the four simultaneous narratives—which change depending on parents’ marriages, on accidents, on (parallel) love affairs with “Amy”—generally succeed in bringing the reader into the convoluted bildungsromane that comprises their lives. Auster’s novel is partly of interest because it is, precisely, the story of immigrant lives, of smart, good-looking Jewish men with the world open to them, of sexuality and its logical experimentations, and—in many cases—of the United States during the post-World War II years, a period of immense change. It is almost as if the four men’s lives are themselves a metaphor for American culture in the twenty years after this country’s greatest war. Such a convoluted fiction, such a long fiction, such a well-written fiction is rare in today’s market. The story possibilities of Archie Ferguson, in whatever configuration he appears, are quantifiable but not, in themselves, gripping (the death scenes of three of the Archie figures are gripping, however). One theme from Auster’s earlier fictions is that of a father-son conundrum, or a father-fatherless son, or a father-sonless pattern, but 4-3-2-1 tries to obscure the patriarchal emphasis, I think, by treating a man’s first sexual experiences with such detail. That these experiences are often gay, despite the number of pages devoted within the book to Amy, seems representative of the post-war freedoms, one set of male characters forced into manhood through military service, another finding a guilt-ridden manhood through same-sex abandon. Auster’s following that plotline seems very mid-twentieth century. It also, collectively, hovers around a tone of existentialism, of the young character’s (characters’) search for meaning, any meaning at all, that darkens what might be read as just an elusive verbal puzzle. On page 806, nine-tenths of the way through the book, following the character of a somewhat more mature Ferguson, the novel describes one such sobering realization: Ferguson didn’t want it anymore. He was burned out and ready to give up, and after telling himself he was finished half a dozen times in the past eight or nine months and then not doing anything about it, this time he wasn’t

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going to back down. He had come to the end of what he could endure. Enough of Rochester, enough of the paper, enough of having to live with his eyes permanently fixed on the dark world of meaningless wars and lying governments and spying undercover cops and angry, hopeless men trapped in dungeons built by the state of New York. It wasn’t teaching him anything anymore. (4-3-2-1 806) Although he is still writing—and writing very, very well—the unflinching truth of a Paul Auster with his “eyes permanently fixed on the dark world” takes readers familiar with his New York Trilogy back into those labyrinths of suggestion, those difficult-to-interpret parables. The last work published by William H. Gass also seems familiar to today’s readers. Available since 2015, Gass’s Eyes: Novellas and Stories, creates a mixed-form impact, much like his Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (although Eyes does not present in multicolored sheets of paper). The prose pieces, accented by disparate kinds of photographs (including one from William James’ Principles of Psychology, another a self-portrait that Gass had himself taken), remind the reader of his comment in Habitations of the Word: “Sometimes texts, like many of Gertrude Stein’s, anticipate the brief, bewildered, even hostile attention they would receive from their readers” (Gass Habitations 156). Like all Gass’s books, this one is arranged with meticulous detail. He uses as epigraph this definition, for his title Eyes: The point where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface is known as an eye. It is a place of mystery, where dry ground becomes soaked with life-giving water, and nature gives us a glimpse of all that happens out of the realm of human vision. As if creating a metaphor for the act of creating—i.e., writing—Gass’s choice of imagery taken from Jan DeBlieu serves, poem-like, to mark once more his seamless use of “philosophy” set against “art,” “poem,” or photograph. Eyes follows the pattern established earlier of accenting writing, writing about both philosophy and life, with illustrations, photos, and drawings. Notes to the book tell the reader that four of the novellas appeared first in Conjunctions; one other in Tin House; another in The Yale Review. One of the pieces, “In Camera,” illustrates the collage effect Gass often preferred. Its parts are titled “The Stork re Mr. Gab,” “The Stupid Assistant, a boy out of Diane Arbus,” “From the Stock of the Stupid Assistant,” and “The Day of Reckoning Arrives.” Here, too, the relationship between the narratives so numbered and these titles remains obscure, and the segments are filled with such pseudo-realistic descriptions as this: In Santa Monica they were fed by the city and without urging would sometimes gather in groups to chat. . . . Many of them had been nuts from their

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first Sunday. “Don’t make eye contact” was the word to the wise. In the window a soulmate would be similarly gesticulating, See me see you seeing me. How did they like the way their stew was served on those loopy paper plates? Where a brown liquid ran from beneath the carrots potato beef like a primeval seep. . . . “I am a negro male senior citizen trying to cope with the following problems: 1. ‘ONE. . . ’ ” (Gass Eyes 85) Gass’s Eyes exists as an integral part of his early fiction. For David Foster Wallace, intently focused on writing a novel to equal or surpass his Infinite Jest, The Pale King—published posthumously after his suicide in the fall of 2008—had become only a mercilessly repetitive account of life within the Internal Revenue Service. Unlike Infinite Jest, The Pale King contained very little humor, but like Infinite Jest, it was packed deep—with actuarial and accounting information. Late in the 1990s, Wallace had begun his training to do this book about the IRS: he took accounting courses, he pored over IRS materials, he scrutinized the kinds of people who worked for that agency—or in any branch of financial services. He wrote and wrote, made recordings, stacked up notes and digressive materials. When The Pale King finally appeared in 2011, anyone who had known David Foster Wallace knew it was a partial manuscript.What Wallace had been planning was a book even longer than Infinite Jest, a novel with many more notes. Wallace’s prose in The Pale King is purposely flat. There are few digressions, and not many of those that do exist seem intended for fun.There are no zany characters and no notes steeped in inside humor or referencing that humor. Postmodern in that there are some authorial interventions, as when Wallace points out that the narrative is set in the Rome, New York, Northeast Regional Examination Center, as he states calmly, “All of this is true. This book is really true,” as if to contradict his initial note, “everything is fictitious.” The author-character further explains to readers that The Pale King is a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a kind of bureaucracy—arguably the most important federal bureaucracy in American life—at a time of enormous internal struggle and soul-searching, the birth pains of what’s come to be known among tax professionals as the new IRS. (Wallace Pale 70) Perhaps more significant than the supposedly factual clues Wallace scatters throughout the book are the verbal signals the prose itself sends. Sometimes the long block paragraphs convey what the reader thinks of as Wallace’s characteristic irony (as when he claims that he is the only person who has read his way through the IRS archives). More generally, as when the “author” who is “David Wallace” here reminisces about being a teenager in high school, the dense blocks of prose, despite Wallace’s neatly perfect sentences, rolling away from the page in

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machine gun symmetry, are almost impossible to comprehend. Many pages, for example, are devoted to the 17-year-old’s sweating problem: “there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to the shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat” (Wallace Pale 93). Some of the most humorous segments of the book are based on the IRS interrogation scenes (“It’s an IRS examiner in a chair, in a room”). The spartan surroundings (the chair, for example, is unpadded) reflect the cold control of the head examiner, who is “the pale king.” Clients are identified not by names but by their social security numbers: their answers, as reported by the agents, are non-answers. The agent’s questions seem as well to be non-questions although they are grammatically correct: the fog index, however, is inpenetrable. By page 546 of The Pale King, the author tells the reader, after hundreds of pages of details about the character’s training to be an IRS agent, “David Wallace disappears—becomes creature of the system.” On the next page, which is the final one,Wallace structures a closing paragraph which appears, on one hand, to be a non sequitur, but is doubtlessly intended to be the heart of the novel: Woman on assembly line counting number of visible loops of twine on outside of bale of twine. Counting, over and over.When the whistle blows, every other worker practically runs for the door. She stays briefly, immersed in her work. It’s the ability to be immersed. (Wallace Pale 547) What The Pale King comes to stand for, I think, is the interface between the earliest postmodern esthetics, especially as they were employed by Pynchon in his 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, and the firmly duplicative strategies David Foster Wallace used as he wrote Infinite Jest, published in 1997. Then there is the hiatus between 1997 and 2011, when The Pale King appears as an edited fiction, three years after Wallace’s death. And then, literary historians suggest, there is another two-year hiatus before Pynchon publishes his 2013 Bleeding Edge, a strangely dulled narrative that has reminded some literary critics of Wallace’s The Pale King. David Cowart notes that Pynchon’s use of the “fraud-investigator protagonist” in Bleeding Edge is a way to “re-imagine the accountant at the center of The Pale King” (Cowart Pyn 20). Savvas echoes him although he draws from Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. But one might disagree because Maxine Tarnow, Pynchon’s fraud investigator, is a woman, not a humorless man, and could be seen to be functioning in the line of Oedipa Maas from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Some protagonists, even in postmodern novels, are capable of functioning well, even if their business is named “Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em,” as Maxine’s is. In a recent essay, Brian McHale discusses the use he thinks David Foster Wallace made of many postmodernist writers: “Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon: all of these father figures are certainly present in Wallace’s fiction, sometimes embraced as models, sometimes slyly subverted, sometimes

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actively resisted, and even travestied. Robert Coover’s presence seems especially strong in the early short fictions of Girl with Curious Hair, along with that of Donald Barthelme and Max Apple. . . . Barth, whom Maxwell Boswell calls Wallace’s “primary fictional father,” is notoriously the object of oedipal resentment in the novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” also from Curious Hair, which, according to the disclaimer on the copyright page, is not only “written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ but also in the margins of a story by Cynthia Ozick.” . . . Burroughs’ is a more diffuse presence, detectable perhaps in Wallace’s grotesque bodily humor and elaborate, campy “routines,” but certainly in his preoccupation with addiction and control. The mock-scholarly apparatus of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) is surely the main precedent for the over-the-top endnotes of Infinite Jest, and it is impossible to ignore the echo of Nabokov in the title of Wallace’s last novel—though exactly how The Pale King might be related to Pale Fire is harder to say. “What about Pynchon?” McHale continues what seems here to be a kind of meditation on relationships among the postmodernists, living and dead. Tom LeClair identifies Wallace as one of the three novelists of his generation— along with Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann—who stand in a conspicuously filial relation to Pynchon, and of the three it is Wallace whom he [LeClair] regards as the most ambivalent toward Pynchon’s legacy—the most patricidal, shall we say. Certainly, at the start of his career Wallace seems all but overwhelmed by the Pynchon precedent.2 Just as Thomas Pynchon moved through this recent decade, publishing Against the Day in 2006, Inherent Vice in 2009, and Bleeding Edge in 2013,3 so John Barth kept up a steady publication of his fictions. Most of these works are novella-length, and few of them have been widely reviewed. After his 2001 Coming Soon!!! A Narrative, he brought out Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas in 2005 and The Development: Nine Stories in 2008. Less visibly postmodern, more akin to works by John Cheever and/or John Updike, these novels and novellas brought new readers into Barth’s company. Not that Barth had given up his usual experimentation with prose and its various forms—even as he wrote about the urban suburbs, he was not above giving readers a surprise ending, or changing the nuance so that characterization was not as it had originally seemed to be. As Jeremy Green saw at the publication of Coming Soon!!!, Barth remained ahead of the game so far as assessing future directions for fiction. The author, Barth as character, uses the term “print fiction” here, or sometimes “p-fiction,” seeing it as an endangered species. As he describes the turn into the twenty-first century, Barth compares the debacle that Y2K might have become to Biblical floods and plagues; even as he pretends that mysterious happenings in the electronic world cannot touch the American writer, his fiction has little direction. There are few plots and correspondingly little movement. In some segments of his stories, Barth turns into essaylike prose, thinking aloud of the changes that separate hypertext from print, and setting up a dialog

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(in Coming Soon!!!) between characters he names “Novelist Emeritus” and “Novelist Aspirant.” He poses them to do “battle for the future of the novel.” As Green points out, the real battle in Coming Soon!!! occurs between e-fiction and p-fiction. Much time is absorbed by this struggling for authority—both over and within the narrative. Along the way, Barth himself as narrator confesses to feeling like a dinosaur from the late age of print. His difficulty stems . . . from the impermanence and fluidity of these cultural forms, and what he calls their “viral nature” (Green Later 58). What Barth accomplishes in his three novellas, Where Three Roads Meet, is a reprise of his techniques in “Lost in the Funhouse.” Creating characters from nostalgic fantasies, Barth recreates his adolescent milieu, when he thought himself headed for a career in music, not so much as a composer as a genius of an arranger. Presenting himself as the character Will Chase, tutored by his older friend Al, he lived in the suave musical atmosphere of Stan Kenton, of Billy Strayhorn’s arrangements for Duke Ellington, and of Sy Oliver’s for Tommy Dorsey. Barth’s use of bifurcated roles—teenaged boy and aspiring musician—enables the three novellas of Where Three Roads Meet to coalesce, giving the character of Will Chase a comic romantic ardor the reader does not question. For Robert Coover, another of the earliest postmodernists, his 2017 novel probes the rules of established genre writing. Huck Out West becomes Coover’s Western, but it also replicates The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In this case, as his title indicates, Tom Sawyer is a failure as a guide for his supposedly inferior friend Huck (though Tom has married Becky and so has won that prize), but Huck manages through sheer grit and ingenuity to survive and prosper in the blood-drenched West. As Coover’s long and illustrious writing career has proved, he finds great satisfaction in his various guises as the creator of such popular forms as detective novel (Noir, 2010), fairy tale (Briar Rose, 1996), political satire in opera form (The Public Burning, 1977), and his earlier Western (Ghost Town, 1998). But in Huck Out West, Coover takes on a double-edged task, to retell Mark Twain’s deft exposé of class and race while also penning a wild and gory Western saga. In his Ghost Town, Coover used as protagonist a “sumbitch, leathery and sunburnt and old as the hills” who appears to be less interesting than his “shying wildeyed horse . . . the scrawny ulcerated thing that he is” (Coover Ghost 3, 19). A sliver of a story, Ghost Town is clearly meant for a brief afternoon’s read. Huck Out West, however, is a substantial novel that takes on the contemporary political world, the outrageous betrayals of friendship, and the character Huck’s power, with his Native American friend Eeteh, to stay alive through their outsmarting the Lakota enemies and through their telling Coyote stories. In Coover’s “Western,” black and white is replaced with white and brown, and the Indian population gets its revenge. Coover keeps Huck’s right-on language, and much of the comedy of the story accrues from idiomatic expressions. As Huck and Tom light out for the territory at the end of Mark Twain’s novel, so too are Huck and Tom here heading west. Tom Sawyer, however, drawn back to civilization through his love for Becky Thatcher and his understanding that being the Thatcher son-in-law will enhance

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his existence, cuts out. What the novel becomes is a kind of bildungsroman of Huck’s existence once he has been, in effect, abandoned by his friend and mentor. Coover redeems Tom by having him come to find Huck and save him from hanging, but the pure and joyous male bonding the book records takes place between Huck and his Lakota friend, with whom he shares not only stories but ingenuity, pride, and trust. Don DeLillo has explored more generic forms, more choices of narrators, and more themes in his career as novelist than have most of his postmodern colleagues. With his post-9/11 novel, Falling Man, he began his fictions of consolidation. As he distilled what would previously have been broad canvasses, his narrative force may be seen to sharpen. Readers have to learn how to read the recent DeLillo fictions. His three recent novels are much shorter than most of his earlier books. After Falling Man in 2007, he published Point Omega in 2010. In many ways, Point Omega Is also concerned with the terrorist destruction—of buildings, lives, and confidence. In this silence-filled novel, the American world comes through as arid. No one communicates; few people interact. Life, instead, is focused on a film existence: in this case, a 24-hour Psycho, running continuously in a New York art museum. DeLillo alternates between the elite New York art world and the dry and inimical Southwest desert. The barrenness of the latter calls to mind the shocking destruction, and resulting barrenness of the World Trade Center location. DeLillo works hard to make his readers aware of holes, gaps in both physical setting and consciousnesses, damages done by human beings with only destruction in mind. The parts set in New York focus on the aging Richard Elster, his attention focused on the artful installation of the ever-running film, a videowork by Douglas Gordon. In the juxtaposition of the actual desert existence that Elster, filmmaker Jim Finley, and Elster’s daughter Jessica are enduring, the memory existence of this MOMA film becomes more real than the lives they attempt to lead. Jessica’s disappearance in the desert becomes a marker for the inordinate sense of loss, of unremitting waste, and of Richard’s vague memories of his role as a cog in the United States war machine grows slighter and slighter. DeLillo shows effectively that Richard Elster had become “one man past knowing.” DeLillo’s 2016 novel, Zero K, continues this progression into the silence, recognizing the same inefficiency of language that began to be enveloping with Point Omega. In that penultimate book, screened images replaced words. The protagonist watches, hours at a time, for the images that convey what meaning exists. In Zero K, there are two sources of meaning, and they remain at war throughout the novel. The older (wiser?) father figure, Ross Lockhart, has invested much of his fortune in a process that could preserve lives past death: as his young wife grows more and more ill, he will test his battery of processes. But his son, Jeffrey, cannot believe in these possibilities and he finds himself affronted at his father’s beliefs. This is the world human beings are meant to love; this existence, tangible and remarkable as it is, deserves our allegiance. DeLillo balances the central belief system of each of his male characters, and only through reader empathy does a sense of any resolution come.

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The novel makes clear that going into the death-defying processing makes a person relinquish language.The exchange of human possibilities has this destructive undertow. As DeLillo brings the novel to its inevitable close, the stunning scene the reader remembers is of the unadorned father: He was naked on a slab, not a hair on his body. It was hard to connect the life and times of my father to this remote semblance. Had I ever thought of the human body and what a spectacle it is, the elemental force of it, my father’s body; stripped of everything that might mark it as an individual life. It was a thing fallen into anonymity, all the normal responses dimming now. I did not turn away, I felt obliged to look. I wanted to be contemplative. And at some far point in my wired mind, I may have known a kind of weak redress, the satisfaction of the wronged boy. (DeLillo K 251) Pages later, as if in reconciliation, Jeffrey learns through his own time of recollection: Sometimes I think of the room, the scant roomscape, wall, floor, door, bed, a monosyllabic image, all but abstract, and I try to see myself sitting in the chair and that’s all there is, highly detailed, this thing and that thing and the man in the chair, waiting for his escort to knock on the door. (DeLillo K 271) DeLillo would be the first of the original postmodern writers to admit that the attempted incorporation of all knowledge, all history, into the intricate, ambitious fictions of the late twentieth century was never meant to provide readers—or writers—with philosophical answers. The postmodern writers of that early time were investigating the unknowable as well as the knowable, the apprehendable, the route to knowledge through language, or through non-language, or, in DeLillo’s last novels, through silences. It has never been any different, no matter the rubric. Literature as today’s readers know it works through language, or through e-fiction or through p-fiction. With all the experimentation known to modernism as well as postmodernism, American literature takes up its incredibly varied routes to meaning.

Notes 1 Irr compares what she considers an American novel, such as John Dos Passos’ USA, with works by Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior), Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) (Irr Geopolitical 176). To these titles one might consider adding more recent novels such as Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, or Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Irr’s conviction, stated throughout her chapter titled “Toward the World Novel,” is that borders are as often emotional as they are geographical. 2 Much of McHale’s essay treats distinguishing characteristics—some very minor—that he thinks make clear how closely Wallace had studied Pynchon’s writing. Although McHale’s

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essay is about The Pale King, several thousand words trace effects in Infinite Jest that mark the novel as Pynchon-influenced (McHale “Pale” 192–194). 3 McHale generalizes, correctly I think, about the fact that the classic postmodern novelists never stopped publishing—a situation that undermined many younger writers at the close of the twentieth century. Their mentors were still being reviewed, still being praised. In McHale’s words, Nineties writers seemed condemned to the status of second-generation postmodernists, acutely aware of their first-generation precursors. . . . Pynchon, Gass, and Coover all published long-awaited novels that had been promised for years, even decades. Barth, Eco, DeLillo . . . Morrison, and Rushdie all continued to publish actively.

(McHale Cambridge 137)

Suggested Further Reading Calinesco, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. Constable, Catherine. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Esthetic. New York: Wallflower P, 2015. Davidson, Guy. Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Dimock, Wai-Chee. Through Other Continents, American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. New York: Grove, 1986. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz:The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 2002. Aldridge, John W. “Afterthoughts on the Twenties and The Sun Also Rises.” New Essays on the Sun Also Rises, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 109–29. Alexander, Elizabeth. The Light of the World. New York: Grand Central P, 2016. Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove, 2000. ———. War Dances. New York: Grove, 2009. ———. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. Boston: Hachette, 2017. Amian, Katrin. Rethinking Postmodernism(s). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Amis, Martin. “Survivors of the Cold War,” Review of Underworld by Don DeLillo. New York Times Book Review, 5 October 1997, pp. 12–13. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., New York:Verso, 1989. Angelou, Maya. Gather Together in My Name. New York: Random House, 1974. ———. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970. Antin, David. Radical Coherency, Selected Essays in Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2011. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1987. Ascari, Maurizio. Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Ashton, Jennifer. From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Auster, Paul. 4 3 2 1. New York: Henry Holt, 2017. ———. City of Glass. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon P, 1985. ———. Ghosts. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon P, 1986. ———. Man in the Dark. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. ———. New York Trilogy. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon P, 1985. Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial, 1956.

148  Selected Bibliography

Banita, Georgiana. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Barros-Grela, Eduardo. “The Spectral City: Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark and Other Imagined Cities.” The City since 9/11, edited by Keith Wilhite. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016, pp. 127–41. Barth, John. Coming Soon!!! A Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ———. The Development: Nine Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. ———.“The End: An Introduction.” On with the Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996, pp. 8–18. ———. The End of the Road. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958. ———. The Floating Opera. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958. ———. “Inconclusion: The Novel in the Next Century.” Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984–1994. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995, pp. 349–66. ———. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1968, pp. 62–72. ———. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1968, pp. 193–206. ———. “Preface.” The End of the Road and The Floating Opera. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958. ———. The Sot-Weed Factor. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960. ———. Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Barthelme, Donald.The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. ———. Snow White. New York: Scribner, 1967. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text, essays selected, edited, and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977, pp. 142–48. Bawer, Bruce. Diminishing Fictions. St. Paul, MN: Greywolf, 1988. Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Bellamy, Joe David. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1967. Bernstein, Michael Andre. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Bloom, Amy. White Houses. New York: Random House, 2018. Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House, 2012. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Labyrinths, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964, pp. 246–47. ———. Dream Tigers. Translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964. Boswell, Marshall, and Stephen J. Burn, editors. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. Bradbury, Malcolm. “Neorealist Fiction.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, pp. 1126–41. Brauner, David. Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Bray, Joe, and Alison Gibbons, editors. Mark Z. Danielewski. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. Burn, Stephen J. “ ‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind.” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 59–85.

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Burroughs, William S. “Introduction to Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Novia Express.” Evergreen Review, vol. 6, 1972, pp. 99–102. Butler, Judith. Frames of War:When Is Life Grievable? New York:Verso, 2009. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:Verso, 2004. Cain, Hamilton. “Papa Dearest.” Oprah Magazine, December 2016, p. 142. Calinesco, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. Calloway, Catherine. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Oxford UP, 2017. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1966. ———. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, 1948. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Cawelti, John G. “Cormac McCarthy, Restless Seeker.” Southern Writers at Century’s End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1997. ———. Mystery,Violence, and Popular Culture: Essays. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2004. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. Moonglow. New York: Harper Collins, 2016. ———. Telegraph Avenue. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. ———. Wonder Boys. New York: Random House, 1995. Clare, Ralph. Fictions Inc. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014. Clinton, Alan Ramon. Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics: Parabilities. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Coale, Samuel. Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodernism and Contemporary American Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012. Colby, Georgina. Bret Easton Ellis. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Coleman, Philip, and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, editors. George Saunders, Critical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Conroy, Mark. Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Constable, Catherine. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood’s Esthetics. New York: Wallflower P, 2015. Coover, Robert. Briar Rose. New York: Grove, 1996. ———. Ghost Town. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ———. Huck Out West. New York: Norton, 2017. ———. “Interview with Robert Coover.” First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing, edited by Frank Gado. New York: Union College P, 1973, pp. 142–59. ———. “The Last Quixote.” New American Review, vol. 11, 1971, pp. 132–45. ———. Noir. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010. ———. The Public Burning. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1977. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Postmodernism.” Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by George Perkins, Barbara Perkins and Phillip Leininger. New York: Harper Collins, 1991, p. 874. Cowart, David. Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth Century Writing. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. ———. Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006. ———. The Tribe of Pyn, Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2015.

150  Selected Bibliography

Cowley, Malcolm. A Second Flowering. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1973. Crews, Michael Lynn. Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017. Culler, Jonathan. “Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, edited by Michael McKeon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000, pp. 51–56. Danicat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York:Vintage, 1994. ———. Create Dangerously:The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Danielewicz, Jane. Contemporary American Memoirs in Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. London: Doubleday Anchor, 2000. Datama, Jessica, and Diane Krumray, editors. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2010. Davidson, Cathy N., and Linda Wagner-Martin, editors. The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Davidson, Guy. Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Davidson, Michael. “Palimtexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text.” Postmodern Genres, edited by Marjorie Perloff. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988, pp. 75–95. Davis, Thadious M. “Sashaying through the South.” South to the Future, edited by Fred Hobson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002, pp. 56–86. ———. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. Debritto, Abel. Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DeGuzman, Maria. Buenas Noches American Culture: Latina/o Esthetics of Night. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. Delaney, Samuel R. Silent Interviews. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1994. ———. Times Square Red,Times Square Blue. New York: New York UP, 1999. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. ———. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian, 21 December 2001. ———. Libra. 1988. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. ———. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010. ———. “The Power of History.” New York Times Magazine, 7 September 1997. ———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. ———. Zero K. New York: Scribner, 2017. Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. New York:Verso, 2004. Devine, Michael. “Early Cinema and the Post-9/11 City: Hugo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” The City since 9/11, edited by Keith Wilhite. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016, pp. 245–60. Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1990. ———. Report to Jennifer Abbott, 2016, pp. 1–5. ———. Understanding Michael Chabon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. Diamond, Elin. “Drama.” The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 255–61. Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. ———. Interview with Toni Morrison, New York Public Library video, 12 December 2013.

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———. “Introduction.” The Best American Short Stories, 2016. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2016, pp. xii–xx. Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1960. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. New York: Knopf, 2011. ———. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005. Dillard, R. H. W. “The Wisdom of the Beast: The Fiction of Robert Coover.” Hollins Critic, vol. 7, no. 2, 1970, pp. 1–11. Dimock, Wai-Chee. Through Other Continents, American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006. Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Knopf, 1971. ———. Homer & Langley. New York: Knopf, 2009. ———. The March. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. Ragtime. New York: Knopf, 1975. Donaldson, Susan V., and Anne Goodwyn Jones, editors. Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997. Dow, William. Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Dowdy, Michael. American Political Poetry into the 21st Century. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2013. Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., editors. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, 1989. Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2003. Duvall, John N., editor. The Cambridge Companion to Fiction after 1945. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Egan, Jennifer. The Keep. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2006. ———. Look at Me. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2001. ———. Manhattan Beach. New York: Scribner, 2017. ———. “Open Shelves.” New York Times Book Review, 26 November 2017, p. 27. ———. A Visit from the Good Squad. New York: Scribner, 2010. Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York:Vintage, 2001. ———. Heroes of the Frontier. San Francisco, CA: McSweeneys, 2016. ———. The Monk of Mokha. New York: Knopf, 2018. ———. You Shall Know Our Velocity! New York:Vintage, 2002. ———. What Is the What. San Francisco, CA: McSweeneys, 2006. ———. Zeitoun. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Elam, Harry, Jr., and Robert Alexander. The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004. Elkin, Stanley. Pieces of Soap: Essays. New York: Tin House, 2016. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. London: Picador, 2000. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York:Vintage, 1952. ———. Juneteenth: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1999. Epstein, Michael. Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2016. Erdrich, Louise. The Blue Jay’s Dance. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. ———. Future Home of the Living God. New York: Harper Collins, 2017. ———. Love Medicine. New York: Henry Holt, 1984.

152  Selected Bibliography

Erickson, Steve. “Blues Dabbler.” New York Times Book Review, 2 April 2017, p. 15. ———. Shadowbahn. New York: Blue Rider P, 2017. Fahy, Thomas. Understanding Truman Capote. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. Fallows, James. “The End of 9/11.” Atlantic, July–August 2008, p. 82. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan, 2007. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Federman, Raymond. “Self-Reflexive Fiction.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, pp. 1142–57. ———. Surfiction: Fiction Now . . . and Tomorrow. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1975. Ferris, Joshua. The Dinner Party and Other Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 2017. ———. To Rise again at a Decent Hour. Boston: Little, Brown, 2014. ———. The Unnamed. Boston: Little, Brown, 2010. ———. Then We Came to the End. Boston: Little, Brown, 2007. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Knopf, 2002. ———. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. ———. Here I Am. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016. Fordham, Finn. “Katabasis in Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Two Other Recent American Novels.” Mark Z. Danielewski, edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011, pp. 33–51. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Fowler, Douglas. A Reader’s Guide to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980. Franklin, Ruth. “A Baby?—or Something Else?” New York Times Book Review, 26 November 2017, p. 8. Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010. ———. Purity. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. ———. “Reflections, Farther Away, ‘Robinson Crusoe’: David Foster Wallace and the Island of Solitude.” New Yorker, 18 April 2011, 81–94. Fredman, Stephen. Contextual Practice, Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Friedman, Ellen G. “Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)modernism, Gender, and the Canon.” Critical Essays on American Postmodernism, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg. Boston: Hall, 1987, pp. 133–51. Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, editors. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. Friedman, Melvin J. “Dislocations of Setting and Word: Notes on American Fiction since 1950.” American Fiction, Historical and Critical Essays, edited by James Nagel. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1977, pp. 80–98. Frow, John. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Post-Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Frye, Steven. “Prospects for the Study of Cormac McCarthy.” Resources for the Study of American Literature, vol. 39, 2017, pp. 1–26. ———. Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Fuchs, Daniel. The Limits of Ferocity: Sexual Aggression and Modern Literary Rebellion. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Gaddis, William. Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1985. Galow, Timothy W. Understanding Dave Eggers. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic, 1978.

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Gass, William H. Conversations with William H. Gass. Edited by Theodore Ammon. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 2003. ———. Eyes, Novellas and Short Stories. New York: Knopf, 2015. ———. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970. ———. Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. ———. Omenstetter’s Luck. New York: New American Library, 1966. ———. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Boston: Godine, 1976. ———. “Preface.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Pocket Books, 1977. ———. The Tunnel. New York: Knopf, 1995. ———. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. New York: Knopf, 1968. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Gauthier, Marni. Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Goldsmith, David H. Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice. Popular Writing Series 2. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1972. Gomaa, Dalia M. A. The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature: Ethnic Women Writers and Problematic Belongings. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Graaff, Kristina. Street Literature, Black Popular Fiction in the Era of U.S. Mass Incarceration. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2015. Gray, Richard. After the Fall, American Literature since 9/11. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ———. A Brief History of American Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism, American Fiction at the Millennium. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Greenberg, Judith, ed. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Gwin, Minrose. Promise. New York: Harper Collins, 2018. Gyasi,Yaa. Homegoing. New York: Knopf, 2016. Hamilton, Geoff. Understanding Gary Shteyngart. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2016. Hannah, Kristin. The Great Alone. New York: St. Martin’s, 2018. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990. Hassan, Ihab. Contemporary American Literature, 1945–1972. New York: Ungar, 1973. ———. “Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” Critical Essays on American Postmodernism, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg. Boston: Hall, 1995, pp. 81–92. Hawkins, Ty. Cormac McCarthy’s Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991. Haytock, Jennifer. “Reframing War Stories: Multivoiced Novels of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 336–54. Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2007. Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction since 1940. London: Longman, 1992. Hill, Nathan. The Nix. New York: Knopf, 2016. Hoberek, Andrew. “The Novel after David Foster Wallace.” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 211–28. Hobson, Fred. “Introduction.” South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002, pp. 1–12.

154  Selected Bibliography

———. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Hogue, W. Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Holland, Mary. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Holloway, Karla F. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992. Horvitz, Deborah M. Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. Houser, Heather. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. Howe, Susan. The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1993. ———. The Midnight. New York: New Directions, 2003. Huber, Irmtraud. Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hume, Kathryn. American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2016. Hurst, Mary Jane. Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative:The Metafictional Paradox. London: Routledge, 1984. ———. “The Pastime of Past Time: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction.” Postmodern Genres, edited by Marjorie Perloff. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988, pp. 54–74. ———. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: United States Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Sifton-Viking, 2016. Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. Jackson, Lawrence Patrick. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Jay, Karla. Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation. New York: Basic, 1999. Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Johnston, John. “Representation and Multiplicity in Four Postmodern American Novels.” Critical Essays on American Postmodernism, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg. Boston: Hall, 1995, pp. 169–81. Juge, Carole. “The Road to the Sun They Cannot See: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Oblivion, and Guidance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 7, 2009, pp. 16–30. Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. New York: Random House, 2016. Kammen, Michael. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Knopf, 1999. Kang, Han. The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith. New York: Hogarth, 2007, 2015.

Selected Bibliography  155

Karl, Frederick. American Fiction 1940–1980. New York: Harper Collins, 1983. Kaufmann, Michael. Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994. Keeble, Arin. The 9/11 Novel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Kelly, Adam. American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1959. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Lacuna. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Random House, 1975. Kocela, Christopher. Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kollin, Susan. Captivating Westerns. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. Kostelanetz, Richard. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. 2nd ed. New York: Schirmer, 2000. Kostova, Elizabeth. The Shadow Land. New York: Ballantine, 2017. Kozol,Wendy. Distant Wars Visible:The Ambivalence of Witnessing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2017. Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 1998. Lagapa, Jason. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Knopf, 2008. Le Clair,Tom. The Art of Excess, Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Lee, Chang-Rae. The Surrendered. New York: Riverhead, 2010. Lee, Julia H. Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018. Lee-Potter, Charlie. Writing the 9/11 Decade. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Leitch, Vincent. Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Lentricchia, Frank.“Libra as Postmodern Critique.” South Atlantic Q, vol. 89, 1990, pp. 431–53. Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ling, Amy. “Maxine Hong Kingston.” The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 458–59. Lloyd, Christopher. Rooting Memory, Rooting Place. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. MacGowan, Christopher. The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Malin, Irving. “Possessive Material.” Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1979, pp. 39–41. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Marche, Stephen. “Are Things Getting a Little Violent.” Esquire, August 2008, pp. 38–39. Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, editors. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Marsh, Nicky. Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory. London: Routledge, 1992. Maus, Derek C. Understanding Colson Whitehead. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. ———. Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2011.

156  Selected Bibliography

Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. McCaffery, Larry. “The Fictions of the Present.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, pp. 1161–77. ———. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982. ———, editor. Some Other Frequency. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. McCaffery, Larry, and Thomas Le Clair, editors. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. 1968. Reprinted. New York:Vintage, 1993. ———. The Road. New York:Vintage, 2006. McCormick, Paul. “Houses of Leaves, Cinema and the New Affordances of Old Media.” Mark Z. Danielewski, edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011, pp. 52–67. McGrath, Charles. “Philip Roth Is Still Here.” New York Times Book Review, 21 January 2018, pp. 1, 16–17. McGurl, Mark. “The Program Era.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 102–29. McHale, Brian, editor. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. ———. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004. ———. “The Pale King, or, the White Visitation.” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 191–210. ———. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. McKinley, Maggie. Understanding Norman Mailer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2017. Mercer, Erin. Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Miller, D. Quentin. The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2016. ———. Understanding John Edgar Wideman. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2017. Miller, Gerald Alva, Jr. Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. Understanding William Gibson. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2016. Miller, Sue. The Lake Shore Limited. New York: Knopf, 2010. Morley, Catherine, editor. 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. “Writing in the Wake of 9/11.” American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Catherine Morley and Martin Halliwell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Morris, Wright. About Fiction. New York: Harper Collins, 1975. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. God Help the Child. New York: Knopf, 2015. ———. Home. New York: Knopf, 2012. ———. “Home.” The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon, 1997, pp. 3–12. ———. “Mourning for Whiteness.” Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America, New Yorker, 21 November 2016, pp. 12–13. ———. The Origin of Others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2017.

Selected Bibliography  157

———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. ———. What Moves at the Margins: Selected Nonfiction. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 2008. Moshfegh, Ottesa. Homesick in the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2016. Mosley, Walter. Charcoal Joe. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2016. Mosser, Jason. “Genre Bending in The Armies of the Night.” Mailer Review, vol. 3, 2009, pp. 307–21. Mullins, Matthew. Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U. S. Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. Nabokov,Vladimir. Lolita. New York:Vintage, 1955. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. ———. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1983. Neculai, Catalina. Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature: Reformed Geographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: The Age of Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985. Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. New York: Penguin Books, 2017. Nguyen,Viet Thanh. The Refugees. New York: Grove, 2016. ———. “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature.” Four Decades On:Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, edited by Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013, pp. 132–54. ———. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove, 2015. Niall, Lucy. A Dictionary of Postmodernism. Chichester/West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Nutley, Alice. Disobedience. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Oates, Joyce Carol. A Book of American Martyrs. New York: Ecco, 2017. ———. “Preface.” Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1979, pp. xi–xiii. O’Brien, Tim. Going after Cacciato. New York: Broadway, 1978. ———. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1990. O’Donnell, Patrick. The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction since 1980. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. ———. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U. S. Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the 1960s. New Haven, CT:Yale UP, 1972. Olsen, Lance. Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1990. Orr, Stanley. Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London:Verso, 1995. Page, Amanda. Understanding Chang-Rae Lee. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2017. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2001. ———. Fight Club. New York: Norton, 1996. Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. ———. Commonwealth: A Novel. New York: Harper Collins, 2016. Peden,William.“Review of Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus.” reprinted NYTBR, 21 January 2018, p. 5.

158  Selected Bibliography

Peppis, Paul. Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. ———, editor. Postmodern Genres. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. Petrovic, Paul, editor. Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Collins, 1971. Proehl, Kristen. “Coming of Age in the Queer South: Friendship and Social Difference in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alison Graham-Bertolini and Casey Kayser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 143–56. Pynchon, Thomas. The Bleeding Edge. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. ———. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Collins, 1966/1986. ———. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Sifton-Viking, 1973. ———. Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Quendler, Christian. From Romantic Irony to Postmodern Metafiction. New York: Lang, 2001. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books:The Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2009. Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Scribner, 1976. ———. “Introduction.” Charles Wright’s The Wig. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 2003, pp. vii–ix. ———. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Scribner, 1972. Rich, Frank. “It Still Felt Good the Morning After.” New York Times Sunday Opinion, 9 November 2008, 9wk. Robbins, Amy Moorman. American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014. Robinson, Douglas. American Apocalypse: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Rollyson, Carl. Understanding Susan Sontag. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2016. Ronnell, Avital. Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994. Roof, Judith. Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change. New York: Routledge, 1996. Rostan, Kimberly. “Reading Traumatically and Representing the Real in Collective Suffering.” College Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, Spring 2006, pp. 172–84. Rother, James.“Parafiction:The Adjacent Universe of Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Nabokov.” boundary 2, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 21–43. Safer, Elaine. “Dreams and Nightmares: ‘High-Tech Paranoia’ and the Jamesonian Sublime— an Approach to Thomas Pynchon’s Postmodernism.” Traditions, Voices and Dreams, edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995, pp. 279–97. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Sapphire, The Kid. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. Saunders, George. “Interview: A Little at a Time. And Iteratively: A Conversation with George Saunders.” George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, pp. 237–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York: Random House, 2017.

Selected Bibliography  159

Savvas, Theophilus. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison, NJ: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. Schultz, Max F. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World. Athens: Ohio UP, 1973. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Segrest, Mab. My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Esthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Short, Kayann. “Postmodern Writing.” The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 699–700. Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers, American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Knopf, 2009. Shteyngart, Gary. Little Failure: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2014. Simmons, David, editor. New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Smethurst, James Edward. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. Smith, Marcus, and Khachig Toloyon. “The New Jeremiah: Gravity’s Rainbow.” Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by Richard Pearce. Boston: Hall, 1981, pp. 169–86. Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. London: Routledge, 2006. Somers-Willett, Susan B. A. The Cultural Poetics of Slam Poetry. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan Stew. New York: Grove, 1979. Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Stimpson, Catharine R. “Literature as Radical Statement.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, pp. 1060–76. Sukenick, Ron. 98.6. New York: Fiction Collective, 1975. ———. Last Fall. Tallahassee: FC2/Florida State U, 2005. Svoboda, Frederic J. Understanding John Updike. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995. Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction from 1950 to 1970. New York: Harper Collins, 1971. Taylor, Bruce Edward, editor. Eating the Menu: A Contemporary American Poetry 1970–1974. Minneapolis: Kendall-Hunt, 1975. Towles, Amor. “On the Waterfront.” New York Times Book Review, 8 October 2017, pp. 1, 24. Trachtenberg, Stanley. “Introduction.” Critical Essays on American Postmodernism. Boston: Hall, 1995, pp. 1–27. Trask, Michael. Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003.

160  Selected Bibliography

Turner, Darwin T. “Black Fiction: History and Myth.” American Fiction, Historical and Critical Essays, edited by James Nagel. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1977, pp. 109–26. Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2015. Vernon, Alex. “Spectator-Citizen-Soldier: History, Genre, and Gender in The Hurt Locker.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 373–96. Versluya, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte, 1973. ———. Complete Stories. Edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. New York: Seven Stories P, 2017. ———. Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade. New York: Delta, 1969. Wagner, Linda W., editor. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Hall, 1979. Wagner-Martin, Linda. A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. ———. Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. The Routledge Introduction to American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2016. ———. “The South as Universe.” South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Fred Hobson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002, pp. 25–55. ———. “Teaching The Bluest Eye.” ADE Bulletin (MLA), no. 83, Spring 1986, pp. 28–31. ———. Toni Morrison: A Literary Life. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. ———. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. New York: Random House, 2000. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. ———. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. Edited by Michael Pietsch. Boston: Little, Brown, 2011. Walsh, Richard. Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. ———. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017. Warren, Kenneth W. What Was African American Literature? Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1987. ———. Metafiction:The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Wegman, Phillip E. Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: United States Culture in the Long 1990s. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962. Wester, Maisha L. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room Is Empty. London: Picador, 1988. ———. City Boy: My Life in New York during the 1960s and ‘70s. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1999. ———. John Henry Days. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2001. ———. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2016. ———. “When Spirits Linger.” New York Times Book Review, 12 February 2017, pp. 1, 22. Wideman, John Edgar. Brothers and Keepers. New York: Henry Holt, 1984. ———. Philadelphia Fire. New York:Vintage, 1990.

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Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Literary Imagination. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Williams, Dana, editor. Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009. Williamson, Jennifer A. Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014. Wright, Charles. The Wig: A Mirror Image. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Random House, 2006. Wyatt, Jean. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2017. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2000. Zevenbergen, Susan J. “Kathy Acker.” Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 6–7. Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso, 1991.

INDEX

Abish, Walter 4, 16, 22, 59, 67, 136; Alphabetical Africa 67; How German Is It 67 Acker, Kathy 4, 16, 22, 42 – 3, 60, 65 – 7, 79, 108; The Adult Life of Henri Toulouse Latrec 65; Blood and Guts in High School 65, 67, 108; Don Quixote 65 – 6; The Early Years of the Black Tarantula 65; Empire of the Senseless 65 – 6, 79; Great Expectations 65 – 6, 108; Hello, I’m Erica Jong 65 Acosta, Oscar Zeta 111 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngpzi 145; Half of a Yellow Sun 145 African American literature 3, 6, 11, 18, 22, 51, 59 – 61, 73, 81 – 8, 91, 101 – 2, 110 Agee, James 51 Aldridge, John 44 Alexander, Elizabeth 113 – 14; The Light of the World 113 – 14 Alexie, Sherman 107, 115 – 16; You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me 115 – 16 Ali, Mohammad 84 Allison, Dorothy 51 American Book Award 91 American dream 43 – 4 American literature 1, 4, 45, 50, 71, 84, 102, 104 – 5, 108, 136 – 7 Amian, Katrin 16, 88 Ammons, A. R. 105 Anderson, Laurie 107 Angelou, Maya 101–102, 110 – 11; Gather Together in My Name 82, 84, 111; I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings 81, 84, 110; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas 84 anti-realist fiction 5 – 7 Apple, Max 142 Armentrout, Rae 107 Arnold, June 51 Arnold, Matthew 7 Arnow, Harriette 51 Arroyo, Rane 107 Ascari, Maurizio 116 – 17, 123 – 4 Ashbery, John 108 Asian-American literature 84, 90 – 1, 102 Asimov, Isaac 62 – 3, 78 Atwood, Margaret 43, 65; The Handmaid’s Tale 65 Auster, Paul 7, 17, 39 – 40, 59 – 60, 128 – 9, 134, 128 – 39; 4 3 2 1 39 – 40, 138 – 9; Man in the Dark 128 – 9, 134; New York Trilogy 7, 57, 60, 138 autobiography 62, 72, 75, 81 – 4, 107 – 8, 110 – 19; see also memoir avant-garde 5, 136 Baker, Nicholas 7; The Mezzanine 7 Baldwin, James 43, 51, 79, 137 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) 105 Barth, John 1, 3 – 7, 9 – 11, 13 – 18, 23, 39 – 43, 59 – 60, 76, 78, 95, 106, 135, 138, 141 – 3, 146; Coming Soon!!! A Narrative 39, 142 – 3; The Development 39, 142; The End of the Road 3, 13, 15, 23; The Floating

Index  163

Opera 3, 13, 15, 23; Letters 12 – 13; “Lost in the Fun House” 13 – 15, 76, 142 – 3; The Sot-Weed Factor 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 23, 40; Where Three Roads Meet 20, 39, 142 – 3 Barth, Karl 46 Barthelme, Donald 1, 4 – 5, 22 – 6, 31, 43, 59, 87 – 8, 142; Snow White 20, 23 – 6, 39 Barthes, Roland 6, 15, 107; Barthes by Barthes 107; “The Death of the Author” 15; S/Z 107 Batchelor, John Calvin 17 Bateson, Mary Catherine 112 Batigalupi, Paolo 63 Baumbach, Jonathan 22 “Beat” writing 3, 25, 104 – 5, 108, 117 The Beatles 4 Beauty and the Beast 21, 64 Beckett, Samuel 6 – 7, 10 – 11, 17 – 18, 41 Bellamy, Edward 62; Looking Backward 62 Bellow, Saul 6, 16, 22, 25, 43, 45 – 6, 48, 56; The Adventures of Augie March 45; Dangling Man 6, 45; The Dean’s December 45; Henderson, the Rain King 45; Herzog 45; Mr. Sammler’s Planet 45 Berge, Carol 105 Bergson, Henri 10 Bernstein, Charles 105 – 6 bildungsroman 13 – 14, 49, 138, 144 biography 62, 75 Black Arts group 3, 68 – 9 Blackburn, Paul 105 “black” humor 3, 21 – 2, 25 – 7 Black Mountain poets 104 – 95 Blaser, Robin 105 Bloom, Amy 79; White Houses 79 Bloom, Harold 107; The Anxiety of Influence 107 Bly, Robert 107 Bok, Sissela 112 Bollingen Prize 117 Bontemps, Arna 68 Book-of-the-Month Club 2, 49 Borges, Jorge Luis 3, 6 – 7, 10 – 11, 13, 15 – 18, 22, 41, 50, 57; Dream Tigers 22; Labyrinths 10 Bowles, Paul 137 Bradbury, Malcolm 6 – 7, 16, 102 Bradbury, Ray 62 – 3, 78 Brauner, David 16, 53, 135 Brautigan, Richard 22, 25, 41, 105; A Confederate General from Big Sur 25 Brin, David 17 Brodsky, Jonathan 107

Brooks, Gwendolyn 68, 79; Maud Martha 68; In the Mecca 68 Brown, Claude 111; Manchild in the Promised Land 111 Brown, Rita Mae 51, 65; Rubyfruit Jungle 65 Buck, Pearl S. 16 Bukowski, Charles 43 Burgess, Anthony 41 Burroughs, William 2, 6, 10, 17 – 18, 22, 31, 65, 105, 141; Naked Lunch 2, 6, 18 Butler, Octavia 16, 64, 78 Cade, Toni 84 Cage, John 107 Cain, Hamilton 98 – 9 Cain, James M. 64 Caldwell, Erskine 51; Tobacco Road 51 Calvino, Italo 41 Calvocoressi, Gabrielle 107 Camus, Albert 3, 6, 15, 18 Capote, Truman 20, 51 – 3, 107 – 9; Breakfast at Tiffany’s 52, 109; In Cold Blood 20, 107 – 9; The Grass Harp 53; Other Voices, Other Rooms 52 – 3 Carter, Angela 41 Carver, Raymond 16, 42, 50, 102 Catch-22 3 Cather, Willa 1, 72 – 3; Sapphira and the Slave Girl 72 – 3 Chabon, Michael 50, 94 – 101, 103, 107, 111; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 97, 99 – 100; Moonglow 96, 98 – 100, 103, 107, 111; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 94; Telegraph Avenue 98; Wonder Boys 94 – 6 Cheever, John 39, 46, 142 Chernin, Kim 112 Choi, Susan 130, 134; A Person of Interest 130, 134 Cleave, Chris 124, 134 Cleaver, Eldridge 111; Soul on Ice 111 Cliff, Michelle 107; Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Despise 107 Clinton, Alan Ramon 16, 40 Coale, Samuel Chase 27 – 8, 40, 128, 134 Cohen, Leonard 4 Collyer, Homer and Langley 90 “confessional” writing 3, 104 Conroy, Frank 111 Coolidge, Clark 105 Coover, Robert 3 – 6, 9, 17 – 24, 39, 59, 67, 88 – 9, 95, 135, 141, 143 – 4, 146; Briar Rose 67, 143; Ghost Town, A  Novel 67,

164 Index

143; Huck Out West 39, 143 – 4; Noir 143; The Origin of the Brunists 11, 15; The Public Burning 3, 13, 19 – 24, 67, 88 – 9, 143 Cornis-Pope, Marcel 3 – 4 Corso, Gregory 105, 117 Cortazar, Julio 67 Coupland, Douglas 16 Cowart, David 59 – 81, 135 – 6, 141; The Tribe of Pyn 59 – 80 Cowley, Malcolm 78 Creeley, Robert 105, 117 Culler, Jonathan 107 Cunningham, Michael 124; Specimen Days 124 Danielewicz, Jane 114 Danielewski, Mark Z. 60, 75 – 7, 106; The House of Leaves 76, 106 Danner, Margaret 68 Dara, Evan 16 Davenport, Guy 108; Da Vinci’s Bicycle 108; Tatlin! 108 Davis, Angela 84 Davis, Thadious M. 50, 71 Davidson, Michael 105 – 7 Dayton Literary Peace Prize 137 “death of the novel” 4, 9 Delany, Samuel 78 DeLillo, Don 3, 16 – 18, 32 – 40, 59, 62, 77, 79, 8, 111, 124 – 7, 132 – 5, 144 – 5; Falling Man 124 – 7, 132 – 3, 144, 146; Libra 34, 134; Mao II 35; Point Omega 39, 144; Ratner’s Star 32, 39, 83; Underworld 3, 35 – 40, 134; White Noise 32 – 3, 40, 59; Zero K 39, 144 – 5 Del Ray, Lester 62 DeSalvo, Louise 112; Breathless 112 Dewey, Joseph 8 – 9, 16 – 17, 29, 31 – 2, 50, 94 – 8, 103 Diaz, Junot 84, 145; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 145 Dickinson, Emily 26, 106 – 7 Didion, Joan 59, 65, 109, 113 – 15, 117; Blue Nights 117; Play It as It Lays 65; The Year of Magical Thinking 114 – 15 DiPrima, Diane 105, 117 Doctorow, Cory 63 Doctorow, E. L. 81, 88 – 90, 102; Billy Bathgate 102; The Book of Daniel 88 – 90, 102; Homer & Langley 90; Loon Lake 89; The March 89 – 90; Ragtime 88 – 9, 102; Welcome to Hard Times 88 Dodd, Wayne 120 Donoghue, Denis 135 – 7

Don Quixote 6 Dore, Florence 41 Dorn, Ed 105; Slinger 105 Dorris, Michael 60 – 1, 68, 71 – 2; A Yellow Raft in Blue Water 68, 71 Dos Passos, John 1, 50, 89, 145; USA Trilogy 89, 145 Dreiser, Theodore 8; Sister Carrie 8 Dubey, Madhu 79, 136 Dubus, Andre III 127, 134; The Garden of Last Days 127, 134 Dumas, Henry 84 Duncan, Robert 105 – 6, 117; Passages 106 Dunn, John Gregory 114 Dylan, Bob 4, 16, 137 Eco, Umberto 16, 41, 146 Egan, Jennifer 60, 75 – 8, 80, 94; Manhattan Beach 60, 76 – 7, 80; A Visit from the Goon Squad 76 – 7 Eggers, Dave 2, 41 – 2, 112 – 13, 117, 136 – 7; The Circle 117; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2, 112, 115; Heroes of the Frontier 117; A Hologram for the King 117; The Monk of Mokha 112 – 13; What Is the What 112; Zeitoun 112 Eisenhower, Dwight David 20 – 2 Eliot, T. S. 10 – 11, 16, 78, 89 Elkin, Stanley 5, 12, 108 Ellis, Bret Easton 57; Less than Zero 57 Ellison, Ralph 6, 11, 18, 43, 68, 79; Invisible Man 6, 11, 18, 68 Englander, Ned 94 Enslin, Ted 105 Erickson, Steve 7, 60, 72 – 4, 77; Arc d’X 72 – 4; The Sea Came in at Midnight 7; Shadowbahn 72 – 4 ethnicity 51, 61, 84, 90 Eugenides, Jeffrey 50, 94 Everson, William 105 existentialism 3, 18, 138 Fahy, Thomas 109 – 10 Fallows, James 128 Farina, Richard 22 Faulkner, William 1, 16, 44, 47, 51, 53, 56 – 7, 83, 86; Absalom, Absalom! 83 Federman, Raymond 5 – 7 “feminist” writing 3, 22, 46, 51, 62, 65, 88, 90 – 1 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 105, 117 Fiedler, Leslie 2 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1, 16, 44, 108; The Great Gatsby 16, 108

Index  165

Flint, F. S. 1 Foer, Jonathan Safran 41, 88, 94, 124, 127 – 8, 134; Everything Is Illuminated 128, 134; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 124, 127 – 8 Ford, Richard 16, 51 – 2, 102, 112; Independence Day 52; The Lay of the Land 52; The Sportswriter 52 Franzen, Jonathan 77, 80, 94, 132; The Corrections 132; Freedom 132 French, Marilyn 3, 65; The Women’s Room 65 Friedman, Bruce J. 22, 25; Stern 25 Friedman, Ellen 49, 66 Friedman, Melvin 43, 56 Frost, Robert 1 Fuentes, Carlos 41, 67 Gaddis, William 4, 6, 9, 12, 16 – 17, 32, 39 – 40, 59, 78, 83; JR 12, 32, 39 – 40, 83; The Recognitions 6 Gaines, Ernest 50 – 1, 79 “gallows” humor 3, 21 – 2, 25 – 8 Gardner, John 59 Gass, William H. 2 – 5, 7 – 17, 21 – 2, 39 – 41, 59, 63, 66 – 7, 95, 107, 135, 139 – 40, 146; On Being Blue (Meditations) 2; Eyes 39, 139 – 40; Fiction and the Figures of Life 2, 5, 7, 22; Habitations of the Word 2, 7 – 9, 11 – 15, 17, 139; In the Heart of the Heart of the Country 12; Omenstetter’s Luck 2, 11 – 12, 15; The Tunnel 2 – 3, 10 – 12, 15 – 16, 40; Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife 11 – 12, 15, 107, 139 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 69 Gauthier, Marni 36 gender 3, 23 – 4, 42 – 3, 46, 51, 60, 63, 75 – 6, 83 genre 13, 44, 61 – 6, 84 – 6, 104 – 18 Gibson, William 16, 62 – 4, 79; “Bridge Trilogy” 63; Count Zero 79; Neuromancer 63 – 4, 79 Gilbert, Sandra 101, 113 Gilchrist, Ellen 130 – 1; A Dangerous Age 130 – 1 Gins, Madeline 22 Ginsberg, Allen 104, 108, 117; Howl 104 – 5; Kaddish 105 Giovanni, Nikki 68 Giza, Peter 107 Glass, Loren 41 globalization 2, 4 – 5, 18, 41, 55, 136; see also transnationalism Gold, Herbert 22, 111

Goldsmith, Kenneth 106 – 7 Gornick,Vivian 112 Grahn, Judy 3 Grass, Gunter 16, 41 Grau, Shirley Ann 51, 58 Gray, Richard 45 – 6, 54, 57 Green, Jeremy 16, 40, 142 – 3 Griffin, Gail 120 Griffin, Susan 22, 108; Word and Nature 108 Gwin, Minrose 112 Gyasi,Yaa 145; Homecoming 145 Hahn, Kimiko 107, 121 – 2 Haley, Alex 111 Hammett, Dashiell 64 Handke Peter 41 Hannah, Barry 51 Harlem Renaissance 79 Hass, Robert 107 Hassan, Ihab 107; Paracriticisms 107; The Right Promethian Fire 107 Hawkes, John 6, 22, 41, 59; The Cannibal 6 Hawkins, Bill 105 Hawkins, Ty 55 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 57, 104 Hazo, Samuel 121 – 2 Heinlein, Robert A. 62 Hejinian, Lyn 22, 105 – 6, 108; My Life 106 – 8 Heller, Joseph 22, 25, 59 Hellman, Lillian 51, 111 Hemingway, Ernest 1, 16, 35, 44, 73, 136; To Have and Have Not 73 Hepburn, Audrey 109 Hersey, John 111; The Algiers Motel Incient 111 Heyen, William 12, 134 Hickok, Lorena 79 Hilfer, Tony 87 – 8 history 18 – 22, 41, 68 – 9, 72 – 4, 84 – 8, 90 – 1, 104 – 6, 117 – 25, 136 – 7, 145 Hoban, Russell 17 Hobson, Fred 57 Hoffman, Gerhard 8 – 9, 18 – 20, 26 – 7, 37 Hogue, W. Lawrence 91 – 2, 102 – 3 Holloway, Karla F. 72 homosexuality 51 – 3 Hornbacher, Marya 111; Wasted, A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia 111 Howe, Susan 105 – 6, 117 Huber, Irmtraud 16, 76, 88 Hughes, Langston 79 Hume, Kathryn 62 – 3

166 Index

humor 3, 11, 21 – 3, 25 – 6, 45, 51, 62 – 3, 66, 96 – 7 Humphries, Josephine 57 Hungerford, Amy 41, 56, 81, 128 Hunt, Erica 107 Hurston, Zora Neale 62 – 3 Hutcheon, Linda 5, 7, 14, 88 – 9, 102 Huyssen, Andreas 40 immigrant writing 68 Ingalls, Rachel 22, 42, 60, 63 – 4, 69, 79, 135; Mrs. Caliban 60, 63 – 4, 69, 79 Ione, Carole 112 Irr, Caren 34 – 5, 136 – 7, 145 Jackson, Shirley 22, 25 James, Henry 3, 7 – 8, 17, 60, 136 James, William 139 Jameson, Fredric 5, 22, 88 – 9, 136 Jamison, Kay Redfield 113 Jarnot, Lisa 107 Jarrell, Randall 1 Jefferson, Thomas 72 – 3 Jewish novelists 43 – 7, 50 – 1, 138 Johnson, Charles 69 Johnson, Denis 17 Johnston, John 43, 83 – 4 Jones, Edward P. 51 Jones, Gayl 84 Jong, Erica 3, 2, 65, 111; Fear of Flying 65, 111; Fruits and Vegetables 111 Joyce, James 3, 11 Kafka, Franz 17, 41 Kalanithi, Paul 113; When Breath Becomes Air 113 Katz, Steve 22 Kaufman, Bob 105 Kaysen, Susanna 111 – 12; Girl, Interrupted 111 – 12 Keats, John 104 Kennedy, William 57; Ironweed 57 Kenner, Hugh 17 Kerouac, Jack 65, 105, 117; “Mexico City Blues” 117; On the Road 105 Kesey, Ken 22, 25 Kingston, Maxine Hong 81, 84, 90 – 4, 102 – 3, 108, 145; Beterans of War,Veterans of Peace 94; China Men 91 – 2, 102, 108; The Fifth Book of Peace 94, 103; I Love a Broad Margin to My Life 94, 103; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book 91 – 4, 103; The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts 84, 90 – 4, 102 – 3, 108, 145

Kinsey, Alfred 52 Klinkowitz, Jerome 7 – 8 Knight, Etheridge 68 Komunyakaa,Yosef 107 Kosinski, Jerzy 22 Kostelanatz, Richard 4 Kraus, Chris 65 Kundera, Milan 41 Kyger, Joanne 105 Lamantia, Philip 105 L = A= N= G = U = A = G = E 105 – 6 Lauter, Paul 68 Le Clair, Thomas 19 – 20, 63, 78, 142 Lee, Chang-rae 131 – 2; Aloft 131; A Gesture Life 131; Native Speaker 131; The Surrendered 131 – 2 Lee, Julia H. 90 – 4, 103 Le Guin, Ursula 59, 62 – 4, 78; Always Coming Home 63 – 4, 78; Earthsea Trilogy 63; The Left Hand of Darkness 63 lesbian fiction 51, 57 Lethem, Jonathan 63 Levertov, Denise 105, 117 Lewis, Sinclair 16, 47 Lin, Tan 107 Lincoln, Abraham 137 Lincoln, Kenneth 55 Ling, Amy 91 Little, Malcolm (Malcolm X) 111; The Autobiography of Malcolm X 111 Llosa, Mario Vargas 67 Lloyd, Christopher 55 Lorde, Audre 68, 111; The Cancer Journals 111 Lowell, Robert 1 Lurie, Alison 65; The War Between the Tates 65 MacGowan, Christopher 44 Mackay Nathaniel 107 Mailer, Norman 20, 22, 43 – 6, 56, 78, 107, 109; Ancient Evenings 44; The Armies of the Night 44, 107, 110; The Executioner’s Song 44, 109 – 10; Of a Fire on the Moon 44; Marilyn 44; Miami and the Siege of Chicago 44; The Naked and the Dead 43; Oswald’s Tale 44; Portrait of Picasso 44; The Prisoner of Sex 44, 109; The Spooky Art 44; Tough Guys Don’t Dance 44; Why Are We in Vietnam? 44, 110 Mairs, Nancy 112 Major, Clarence 3, 22, 43, 59 – 60, 69, 79; All Night Visitors 22; Emergency Exit 79; Reflex and Bone Structure 22, 79; Such Was the Season 79

Index  167

Malamud, Bernard 17, 46, 56 Malin, Irving 49 – 50, 111 Maltby, Paul 5 – 7, 18, 29, 31 Man Booker Prize 137 Mann, Thomas 78 Marche, Stephen 122 Mark Twain 136, 143; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 14 Marquez, Gabriel Garia 16, 41, 67 Marshall, Brenda K. 88 Martin,Valerie 50 Maslin, Janet 134 Maus, Derek 16, 24 Mayer, Bernadette 105 – 6 Mbue, Imbolo 145; Behold the Dreamers 145 McCaffery, Larry 16, 19, 29, 38, 62 – 3, 66 – 7, 79, 107 – 8, 117 McCarthy, Cormac 53 – 4, 59 – 60, 78, 122, 129; All the Pretty Horses 53; Blood Meridian 53, 122; Child of God 53; Cities of the Plain 53; The Crossing 53; No Country for Old Men 53; The Orchard Keeper 53; Outer Dark 53, 55; The Road 53 – 5, 129; Suttree 53 McCarthy, Mary 46 McCarthyism 109 McClure, Michael 105 McCormick, Paul 76 McCullers, Carson 51 – 2, 56, 58; The Ballad of the Sad Café 52; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 52; The Member of the Wedding 52; Reflections in a Golden Eye 52 McElroy, Joseph 39 – 40, 83, 108; Lookout Cartridge 39 – 40, 83 McHale, Brian 4 – 5, 11, 17, 38 – 9, 78 – 9, 81, 88 – 9, 102, 106, 141 – 2, 145 – 6 McInerney, Jay 57, 124; Bright Lights, Big City 57; The Good Life 124 McKay, Nellie 85 McKinley, Maggie 44 McSweeney’s 41, 112 – 13 Melville, Herman 3, 102, 104; Billy Budd 102 memoir 44, 62, 110, 112 – 13; see also autobiography Merwin, W. S. 107 Messud, Claire 131; The Emperor’s Children 131 metafiction 7, 35, 88 – 9, 102 Michener, James A. 17 Miller, Arthur 56 Miller, Gerald 64, 79 Miller, Glenn 97 Miller, John 104 Miller, Sue 131; The Lake Shore Limited 131

Millhauser, Steven 107; Edwin Mullhouse 107 Milton, John 104 miscegenation 83 modernism 1, 3, 5, 8 – 11, 44, 60, 78, 83, 104 – 18, 145 Monette, Paul 112 Monroe, Harriet 1 Moody, Anne 111; Coming of Age in Mississippi 111 Moody, Rick 94 Moore, Marianne 104 Moramarco, Fred 122 Moretti, Franco 42 Morgan, Susan 17, 22 Morrison, Toni 7, 16, 18, 59 – 60, 73, 77 – 9, 81 – 8, 90, 101 – 2, 111, 120, 137, 146; Beloved 79, 85 – 8, 102; The Bluest Eye 81 – 2, 84, 102; God Help the Child 87, 101 – 2; “Home” 85; Home 85, 87, 101 – 2; Jazz 7, 87; Love 87; A Mercy 87; The Origin of Others 85 – 7, 101; Paradise 85 – 7, 101; Playing in the Dark:Whiteness and the Literary Imagination 73; “Recitatif ” 85; Song of Solomon 79, 84, 102; Sula 82 – 4, 102, 111 Mosley, Jennifer 107 Mullen, Harriette 107 Munro, Alice 43 Nabokov,Vladimir 6, 18, 41, 57, 59 – 60, 62, 77, 107, 141 – 2; Ada 62; Lolita 57; Pale Fire 77, 107, 142; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 59 National Book Award 32, 44, 47, 53, 59, 72, 76, 80 Native American 6, 60 – 1, 68, 71 – 2, 102, 115 – 18, 131, 143 – 4 Naylor, Gloria 60, 71 – 3, 77, 79; Linden Hills 72; Mama Day 71 – 3, 79; The Women of Brewster Place 73 Neculai, Cataline 80 neo-realist fiction 5 – 7 New Journalism 44, 47, 108 – 10 Newman, Charles 48 Newton, Huey 84 Nguyen,Viet Thanh 145; The Sympathizer 145 9/11 fiction 46, 55, 73 – 4, 119 – 34 Nixon, Richard 19 – 22, 89 Nobel Prize in Literature 1, 16, 43, 45 – 6, 87 – 8, 137 Nye, Russel B. 88 Oates, Joyce Carol 16, 42, 46 – 50, 57, 7, 78, 102, 113; Angel of Light 67; Because It

168 Index

Is Bitter 49; A Book of American Martyrs 46 – 8; Expensive People 47; A Garden of Earthly Delights 47; The Poisoned Kiss 57; them 47; Upon the Sweeping Flood 47; Wonderland 47 Obama, Barack 123 O’Brien, Tim 17, 111 O’Connor, Flannery 51, 58, 64, 77 O’Donnell, Patrick 16, 32, 34 – 6, 80 Oedipus Rex 80 Olsen, Lance 41, 57, 66, 135 – 7 Olson, Charles 1, 105 – 6, 108; Maximus 106 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 3 O’Neill, Eugene 1 O’Neill, Joseph 129 – 30, 134; Netherland 129 – 30, 134 orality 85 Orlovsky, Peter 105 Orr, Gregory 107 Orwell, George 34; 1984 34 Ozick, Cynthia 42, 46, 142 Page, Amanda 132 Palahniuk, Chuck 75; Choke 75; Fight Club 75 Paley, Grace 3, 42, 46, 56 – 7; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute 57; The Little Disturbances of Man 57 Palmer, Michael 105 Parker, Robert B. 111 Patchen, Kenneth 7, 22 Patchett, Ann 60, 75, 78; Bel Canto 75; Commonwealth 75 Percy, Walker 17, 51; The Moviegoer 51 Perelman, Bob 105 Peres, George 17 Perloff, Marjorie 107 Picasso, Pablo 9 Piercy, Marge 3, 62; Woman on the Edge of Time 62 Plath, Sylvia 3, 43, 65, 101; The Bell Jar 43, 65 Podhoretz, Norman 111 Poe, Edgar Allen 50, 62 Pogrebin, Letty 112 post-contemporary fiction 5, 7 – 8 postmodernism 1 – 41, 43, 45, 48 – 51, 53, 55, 59 – 80, 81 – 103, 104 – 18, 135 – 46 postwar 43, 46 Pound, Ezra 1 – 2, 9, 17 Powers, Richard 17, 38, 50, 59 – 60, 80, 94, 142; The Echo Maker 74 – 5, 80; Generosity 74 – 5; Operation Wandering Soul 74 – 5 Presley, Elvis 74

Price, Richard 67; Ladies Man 67 Proust, Marcel 78 Puig, Manuel 67 Pulitzer Prize 44, 53, 56, 68, 76, 80, 87, 95, 104, 110, 112, 137 Purdy, James 25, 57; Cabot Wright Begins 57; The Nephew 25 Pynchon, Thomas 3 – 6, 9, 11, 17 – 20, 22 – 6, 27 – 31, 34, 38 – 40, 59 – 60, 63, 73 – 4, 77 – 8, 83, 88, 94 – 5, 100, 111, 128, 134 – 5, 141 – 3, 145 – 6; Against the Day 27 – 8, 40, 128, 134, 132; Bleeding Edge 141 – 2; The Crying of Lot 49 4 – 5, 22 – 6, 39 – 40, 141; Gravity’s Rainbow 3, 27 – 34, 63, 83, 100, 111, 137, 141; Inherent Vice 142; Mason & Dixon 141; V. 5 Queneau, Raymond 17 race 3, 22, 51, 61 – 5, 68 – 73, 80 – 94 Radway, Janice 42, 49 Randall, Dudley 68 Reade, Frank 62 realism 43, 46 – 8 Reed, Ishmael 3, 17, 22, 43, 59 – 60, 79; Flight to Canada 69; The Free Lance Pallbearers 22, 69; Mumbo Jumbo 22, 69; Yellow-Backed Radio Broke Down 22, 69 Rich, Adrienne 3, 111 Rich, Frank 123 Rilke, Rainer Marie 92 – 3 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 6 Rodriguez, Richard 111 Roosevelt, Eleanor 79, 97 Rosenberg, Ethel 20 – 4, 88 – 9, 109 Rosenberg, Julius 20 – 2, 88 – 9, 109 Roth, Philip 22, 42 – 5, 56, 59, 78, 111; American Pastoral 44; Goodbye, Columbus 44; The Plot Against America! 45; Portnoy’s Complaint 44 – 5 Rushdie, Salmon 17, 124, 146; Shalimar the Clown 124 Russ, Joanna 78 Safer, Elaine 22 Salinger, J. D. 25, 42, 56; The Catcher in the Rye 25 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 6, 18 Saunders, George 137; Lincoln in the Bardo 137 Savvas, Theophilus 80, 88 – 90 Scalapino, Leslie 107 science fiction 57, 62 – 5, 78 Seaver, Edwina 121

Index  169

Sebold, Alice 112; Lucky 112 self-fiction 62 self-reflexive fiction (surfiction) 5 – 6 Shacochis, Bob 17 Shakespeare, William 64 – 5, 72, 104; The Tempest 64 – 5, 72 Shelley, Mary 62; Frankenstein 62 Showalter, Elaine 47 Shteyngart, Gary 116 – 17; Little Failure: A Memoir 116 – 17 signifying 69 – 70 Silko, Leslie Marmon 17, 111 Silliman, Ron 105 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 16, 56 Smitherman, Geneva 69 Snyder, Gary 105, 117 Sollars, Phillippe 17 Sontag, Susan 2, 46 Sorrentino, Gilbert 3, 16 – 17, 22, 40, 59, 108; Mulligan Stew 3, 16, 40, 108 Southern fiction 43, 51 – 2, 55 – 8 Spahr, Juliana 107 Spencer, Elizabeth 51, 58 Spicer, Jack 105 Spicer, Robin 105 Spiegelman, Art 124; In the Shadow of No Towers 124 Stein, Gertrude 1, 10, 105 – 6, 117, 136; The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas 117 Steinbeck, John 16 Steinem, Gloria 112 Stephenson, Neal 17 Sterling, Rod 63 Sterne, Laurence 3, 18, 41 Stevens, Wallace 1, 10, 104 Stone, Robert 16 Stravinsky, Igor 9 Strayad, Cheryl 110; Wild 110 Stross, Charles 63 Strout, Elizabeth 94 Styron, William 51 Sukenick, Ron 22, 105, 107; Up 107 Svoboda, Frederic 57 Talese, Gay 109 – 10 Tanner, Tony 43, 56 Taylor, Peter 51 terrorism 119 – 21; see also World Trade Center Thomas, Piri 111; Down These Mean Streets 111 Thompson, Hunter 22, 107, 109 – 10; Fear and Loathing 107 Thoreau, Henry David 60

Towles, Amor 77, 80 transnationalism 55; see also globalization Trethewey, Natasha 51, 107 Trilling, Lionel 2 Tristram Shandy 6 Turnbull, Gael 105 Turner, Darwin 69 Updike, John 46 – 8, 51, 57, 103, 121, 134, 142; The Centaur 46; Couples 46; Rabbit, Run 46, 51; Terrorist 124, 134; The Witches of Eastwick 57 uplift fiction 81 – 2 Van O’Connor, William 2 Veggian, Henry 33 – 6 Verne, Jules 62 Vidal, Gore 51 Vietnam 110, 122, 137 Vizenor, Gerald 6, 22; Griever, An American Monkey King in China 6 Vollman, William T. 17 von Kleist, Heinrich 89 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 4, 6 – 7, 9, 22, 25, 59, 62 – 4, 78, 107, 111; Breakfast of Champions 111; Cat’s Cradle 63, 78; Complete Stories 78; God Bless You, Mr.Rosewater 63; Mother Night 63; Player Piano 63; The Sirens of Titan 63; Slaughterhouse-Five 62, 107 Wakoski, Diane 105 Walker, Alice 3, 50 – 1, 60, 67 – 70, 77, 79; The Color Purple 67, 70, 79; “Everyday Use” 60, 69 – 70 Wallace, David Foster 3, 17 – 18, 37 – 41, 38, 140 – 2, 145 – 6; Girl with Curious Hair 142; Infinite Jest 3, 37 – 40, 138, 140, 146; The Pale King 39, 140 – 2, 146 Warhol, Andy 4 Watten, Barrett 105 Waugh, Patricia 7 Welch, James 79; Winter in the Blood 79 Wells, H. G. 62 Welsh, Lew 105 Welty, Eudora 51, 56, 58 West, Nathanael 18 Whalen, Philip 105, 108 White, Edmund 112 Whitehead, Colson 137; Apex Hides the Hurt 137; The Intuitionist 137; John Henry Days 137; New York Trilogy 137; The Underground Railroad 137 Whitman, Walt 93, 117

170 Index

Williams, Tennessee 51, 52, 56; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 56; S Streetcar Named Desire 56 Williams, Terry Tempest 121 Williams, William Carlos 1, 66, 104 – 6, 117; Paterson 66 Wolf, Christa 41 Wolfe, Tom 109 – 10 Wolff, Gregory 112; The Duke of Deception 112 Wolff, Tobias 112; This Boy’s Life 112

Woolf,Virginia 83; Mrs. Dalloway 83 Wordsworth, William 104 World Trade Center 119 – 25, 128, 130, 144 World War I 90 World War II 1, 3, 5, 16, 19, 22, 31, 33, 40, 62 – 3, 68, 77, 79, 89, 98 – 100, 104, 122, 136 – 7 Wright, Charles 3, 11, 60; The Wig 3, 11 Wright, Richard 50