Recent American fiction examined

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 10

Recent American fiction examined

City of Words. Tony Tanner. Jonathan Cape. 463 pp.

(Reviewed by P. D. E.) In discussing the lexical aspect of American writing in the last 20 years Dr Tony Tanner erects a verbal metropolis himself, producing 445 pages in an attempt to establish the common denominator he finds in recent American prose fiction. Remembering earlier critical writing which attempted to encapsulate wide areas of American writing, the reader of “City of Words” might wonder not only whether the common denominator can withstand careful documentation and specific definition, but whether it can be convincingly applied to the 25 writers Dr Tanner studies. Novelists of such apparently irreconcilable methods and preoccupations as Burroughs and Roth are brought together, and this study cuts across genres in an effort to link the illogical, satiric world of Joseph Heller and the ostensible realism of John Updike. The formula with which Dr Tanner attempts to make this remarkable synthesis is stated in a provocative introduction to the book, which gives it a nineteenth-century background. He feels “that there is an abiding dream in American literature that an unpattemed, unconditioned life is possible, in which your movements and stillnesses, choices and reputations are your own; and that there is also an abiding American dread that someone else is patterning your life, that there are all sorts of invisible plots afoot to rob you of your autonomy of thought and action, that conditioning is übiquitous.” The sociological phenomenon reflected here has become a part of literature because the “problematical and ambiguous relationship of the self to patterns of all kinds—social, psychological, linguistic—is an obsession among recent American writers.” Obviously enough, Dr Tanner has isolated an important aspect of the American Dream which has acquired literary status, and his book is concerned with the predicament of the fictional hero who seeks a balance between social congelation and chaos, and with the writer who must similarly strike a balance between the patterns of traditional writing, which falsifies experience by placing it at a remove from the reader, and the chaos of unpattemed words, which render experience unintelligible. Hence the contemporary concern which builds what Dr Tanner calls the “City of Words.” As might be expected, the attempt to apply what is virtually the same interpretation to all recent American writing leads to uneven criticism, and the reader of "City of Words" may sometimes feel that important parts of

PERIODICALS The contents of “Delta,” described as “a review of arts, life, and thought in the Netherlands,” vary considerably from issue to issue, but always seems to contain a large proportion of material of interest to the general reader. The latest issue (Vol. 13 No. 4) includes articles on Ed Hoomik (the first managing director of “Delta”), Comenius (a "Czech patriot and pedagogue, mystic and pamphleteer” of the seventeenth century), and Domela Nieuwenhuis, a very influential Dutch social thinker at tiie start of this century; these, as well as other articles, are well supplied with numerous illustrations and plates. Literary enthusiasts will find a short story, poems, and an article on contemporary Dutch literature, and there is also a fascinating account of the activities of Multi-Press International in producing democratic consumer art The standard of the writing is uhiformly high, and the lay-out is impressive.

contemporary fiction are left unexplained by it One effect of the rather

inflexible approach is the inflation of the stature of lesser writers beyond proportion: those who come out of this study well are Ralph Ellison (who has written one novel), William Burroughs (who writes what he calls "antinovels”), Norman Mailer (who no longer writes novels), and Kurt Vonnegut (who calls his novels “entertainments”). It is the expatriate Russian, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote much before the period this study covers, who, ironically, is best suited by its standards and for whom Dr Tanner makes his most convincing argument. But other writers are made to inhabit “City of Words,” and the third chapter, “A Mode of Motion,” is a good example of Dr Tanner’s occasional willingness to force genius to dwell humbly there. It is a study of Bellow and Heller, and the former is judged mainly by “The Adventures of Augie March,” an atypical work which Bellow consciously made different from his other novels. While it illustrates vividly the thesis of flight from system and society, "The Adventures of Augie March” is no key to the remainder of Bellow’s writing, and further mention of his two most recent books in a later chapter shows how Dr Tanner’s thesis applies to the periphery instead of the core of Bellow’s art Similarly, Heller’s "Catch 22” contains a great deal more than Yossarian’s flight from the military system, which the remainder of this chapter examines. Furthermore, neither of these novelists is much preoccupied with the relationship of the individual to linguistic patterns, which is proclaimed in the introduction to this study. In this area, Dr Tanner’s theory seems barely useful. There is, however, a group of chapters devoted to writers whose work clearly illustrates the insight which began "City of Words.” Apart from Ellison and Burroughs there are James Purdy, whose ephemeral depictions of a surreal world Dr Tanner brilliantly discusses, particularly in the section on "Cabot Wright Begins;” Thomas Pynchon, whose fiction is shown to be based on a system of realised symbols; and John Hawkes, whose mordant fictional universe Dr Tanner feels to be the most extreme retreat yet from the patterns of reality. In a convincing concluding chapter, lesser - known

writers (Gaddis, Barthelme, and Brautigan) are discussed, and this is clearly the kernel of the book. The author’s tantalising treatment earlier of Hawthorne and Melville in the context of his thesis is also compellingly good, so good in fact that one wonders why there are not more older edifices in “City of Words.” But while it is exciting to see an ambitious examination of very recent fiction, it is often difficult to understand the nature of the “principle of selection” Dr Tanner mentions in a prefatory note. There he acknowledges the inevitability of omitting some authors from his study, and names Styron, Berger, Southern and others he has left out, although these writers might provide more fruitful areas for the application of his theory than do Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Heller. Inevitably, the reader must feel that this study is both provocative and misdirected, both accurate and arbitrary, a book which by seeking to place recent American fiction in a city of words only proves that a robust literary community will always exist beyond its walls. The book is devised to allow the reader to choose his order of reading from a number of self-contained chapters; if Dr Tanner himself had removed a couple beforehand his study, though more- modest, would have had greater unity and conviction.

If the motive for including some wellknown writers was to broaden the book’s appeal as well as its apparent significance, a more considered revision than is apparent would have been helpful. The metaphoric nature of the relationship of the writer to the hero is not acknowledged, and there is no exploration of the possibility that many of the writers treated use their lexical heritage literally, by expanding metaphors into actual situations (one of Ellison’s characters, figuratively “in a hole,” actually ends up in a hole under the ground). There are other, more unfortunate, signs that “City of Words” was built in haste: occassionally a sentence is alarmingly awkward, characters* names are misspelled, and once the brother of Bellow’s Herzog is confused with Herzog himself. Careless indexing leaves the reader unsiire whether one chapter refers to McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” or to “The Medium is the Massage.”