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25 Years of American Fiction
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By Michael Dirda
Sunday, June 1, 1997
Picking the winners in fiction's race for the canon really is a mug's game, espe
cially since teachers and critics keep changing the track rules. A front-runner
like Hemingway now seems ready for the pasture, or even the knacker's yard, whil
e a late-starter such as Zora Neale Hurston recently swept into the winner's cir
cle of the Library of America. Will she stay there? Will Hemingway make a comeba
ck? Wait and see.
Still, on an anniversary, near the end of a century, it's fun to look back on 25
years of American fiction, to make a few guesses, cheerlead for the underapprec
iated, observe the trends. I haven't read all the important fiction since 1972 - hardly -- and am likely to miss any number of favorite writers and books. But
I'm not locking down a definitive shortlist or charting bestsellers: More simply
, these are the books that, to my mind, have been the truest mirrors to American
society in our time, or have attempted innovative forms of storytelling, or rev
ealed new subject matter, or generated schools of imitators, or done all of thes
e. Of course, a few are simply books that won my heart and I can't help but love
them.
These United States
Let's start with the key works, those few books since 1972 that have tried, with
more success than not, to depict the complex and troubled soul of America. I me
an Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, John Cheever's Collected Stories, John Up
dike's Rabbit tetralogy, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Raymond Carver's Where
I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, William Gaddis's JR, Cormac McCarth
y's All the Pretty Horses, and E. Annie Proulx's undervalued Accordion Crimes. I
think all these books could and should become classics, school texts, the books
that represent our quarter-century in future literary histories. All are substa
ntial efforts that take up, often with visionary power, the cankers and rose-col
ored dreams of contemporary American life: politics, race, money, work, technolo
gy, coming of age, the spiritual self, immigration, sex, suburbia. If you want t
o understand the way we live and think and feel now, these are the books to read
first.
If, however, one were to push forward the single author who best addresses the o
bsessions of the past 25 years, Don DeLillo is the man. His first book, propheti
cally titled Americana, appeared in 1971, and since then he has published a half
-dozen novels devoted to the paranoid style in American life, chief among them P
layers, The Names, White Noise (a professor of Hitler studies caught up in an Ai
rborne Toxic Event), Libra (Lee Harvey Oswald), and Mao II ("the future belongs
to crowds"). A new book, rumored to be his masterwork, is due this fall. In DeLi
llo's case the oeuvre seems greater than any single title in it.
A handful of other strong writers can also point to an impressive body of work a
s the best representation of their talents: the much-mocked but phenomenally gif
ted Joyce Carol Oates; the virtuosic pasticheur Thomas Berger; the dean himself,
Saul Bellow; cool and canny Philip Roth; the wittiest Roman of them all, Gore V
idal; the late Stanley Elkin, master of razzmatazz; and that doleful enchanter S

teven Millhauser. One might also include Updike here, especially for his first-c
lass short fiction (surely an omnibus volume is overdue), his one-shots such as
The Witches of Eastwick and his African satire The Coup, and, not least, for his
wide-ranging criticism and appealing poetry: Like him or not (I do), he is our
most accomplished living man of letters, just as Vidal is our most entertaining.
Forced to choose single works by such captains of industry, I would especially
praise Berger's Pulitzer-denied depiction of small town life in the 1930s, The F
eud; Roth's portrait of the artist, the Nathan Zuckerman sequence (particularly
The Ghost Writer); Elkin's tour de force about a Florida retirement community, M
rs. Ted Bliss; and Bellow's homage to Delmore Schwartz, Humboldt's Gift. Oates's
novels are so various -- from the gothicky Bellefleur to the grim Because It is
Bitter and Because It is My Heart to the suave psychological thrillers written
as Rosamond Smith -- that one can only shake one's head in astonishment.
Which leaves Steven Millhauser. In a neat bit of framing Millhauser brought out
his dazzling first book, Edwin Mullhouse, in 1972 (the year Book World was born)
and this year received a Pulitzer Prize for his latest, Martin Dressler. He is,
I believe, the most inventive, wistful, sexy and dryly comic American writer of
our time, his only compeers being John Crowley and Russell Hoban. Millhauser's
forte is the short story or novella (In the Penny Arcade, The Barnum Museum, Lit
tle Kingdoms), often about a dreamy, and usually doomed, minor craftsman -- a ca
rtoonist, a creator of clockwork automatons, a master illusionist, a neglected p
ainter. At his best this reserved genius can disclose the tragic love story hidd
en in the entries of an art exhibition catalogue, revel in the illicit gropings
among the play pieces in a game of Clue, take you aboard for the eighth voyage o
f Sinbad, or coolly describe the jaded erotic fancies of ancient Cathay.
Crowley's Little, Big is the most generally admired postwar American fantasy (an
d a favorite novel of critic Harold Bloom). The Drinkwater clan lives in a turnof-the-century house that seems to grow bigger the farther you go into it; their
family photo album includes pictures of elves; and they turn out to be major pl
ayers in the secret history of the world. The diminuendo of the book's closing s
entences evokes its autumnal magic: "The world is older than it was. Even the we
ather isn't as we remember it clearly once being, never lately does there come a
summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as o
dorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once
upon a time they were." As for Russell Hoban, at his best he is the finest all-r
ound writer in the world: author of brilliant picture books (about Frances the B
adger and Captain Najork); of a wistful, Beckett-like parable for middle readers
, The Mouse and His Child; and of the inspired Riddley Walker, a post-nuclear ho
locaust Huckleberry Finn, told in fractured English, largely about spiritual reg
eneration. Like this last's youthful hero, Hoban remains at heart a "connection
man," looking for meaning beneath the surfaces of life.
Particular Pleasures
Riddley Walker is one of my favorite American novels of the past quarter-century
, along with John Sladek's shamefully neglected, and very funny, Roderick: The E
ducation of a Young Machine; Gene Wolfe's grave and subtle Book of the New Sun - if T.S. Eliot were to write science fiction, this would be the result; Gilbert
Sorrentino's rumbustious send-up of the literary life, Mulligan Stew; David Mar
kson's gallows-humorous novel cum commonplace book, Reader's Block; and that apo
theosis of petitesse, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, an epic about a young bus
inessman on his lunch hour.
A similarly fizzy mix of sighs and laughter characterizes the stories of Donald
Barthelme, laced as they are with deadpan jokiness, high-culture literary allusi
on, and hip, urban lingo. For a good decade Barthelme the scrivener was the most
influential short-story writer in the country, preceded in this hallowed post b
y John Cheever, the grandmaster of suburban desperation, and followed by Raymond

Carver, the minimalist laureate of the working and drinking classes. Though the
se last seem to me writers of greater depth, Barthelme could make you laugh out
loud. Two other comic writers of this time stand out: Peter De Vries, with his s
atires of modern religion and sexuality (in Slouching Toward Kalamazoo a contemp
orary Hester Prynne wears a sweater proudly emblazoned with a scarlet A Plus), a
nd the multi-talented Garrison Keillor, whose Lake Wobegon Days -- relating the
serio-comic history of a small Minnesota town -- was heralded as an American cla
ssic, but mainly in Britain. Perhaps we've grown so used to hearing Keillor spin
out his extravagant, Thurberish tales on the radio that we underestimate his am
azingly fertile genius.
The critic George Steiner (whose own short novel, The Portage to San Cristobal o
f A.H., allows an aged Adolf Hitler to defend his racist policies -- and to take
credit for the creation of Israel) once named William Gass and Guy Davenport th
e two most distinctive stylists in America. Gass's stunning early fiction falls
outside the time limits of this essay, but The Tunnel looks, so to speak, as tho
ugh it might become a literary K-2, a perennial challenge to tough, fearless rea
ders: It relates, in dizzying leaps of simile and stretches of metaphor, the rea
l and fantasy life of a morally repugnant college professor of German history. L
ike Gass, Guy Davenport is better known as an essayist, but his fiction -- colla
ges of higher learning -- exhibits an almost hieroglyphic beauty. Try Tatlin! or
Da Vinci's Bicycle.
Say the word "style" in fiction circles and the name James Salter cannot be far
behind. Exquisitely urbane, almost raffish, Salter is the contemporary writer mo
st admired and envied by other writers. Like a fighter pilot or mountain climber
(he has been both), Salter displays perfect control and understated grace; he c
an, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence. (Fans frequently quote to e
ach other the closing paragraph of his erotic third novel, A Sport and a Pastime
.) Dusk and Other Stories won a PEN/Faulkner award, but Light Years, his ambitio
us, somewhat neglected account of a marriage winding down, may be his masterpiec
e.
Salter has published only a half-dozen, relatively short but perfect books in 40
years. One might liken his unassuming artistry to that of other unassuming, pro
udly regional masters: Baltimore's Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist), Albany's
William Kennedy (Ironweed), North Carolina's Reynolds Price (Kate Vaiden), as w
ell as Alison Lurie (The War Between the Tates), Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres),
Alice McDermott (At Weddings and Wakes), and New York City's E.L. Doctorow (Rag
time). Each has produced superb work, won prizes, given temporary respectability
to the bestseller list -- and yet always seemed slightly old-fashioned, quietly
content to cultivate his or her particular postage-stamp of soil. Here the mode
l is the genial Peter Taylor, whose easygoing, bourbon-smooth prose in The Old F
orest and Other Stories chronicles life among shabby-aristocratic Tennesseans. T
aylor's old friend Randall Jarrell once dubbed him the American Chekhov, and, as
usual, childe Randall was spot on.
The Sound of Many Voices
Most of the writers mentioned so far have been WASPs, white Southerners or urban
Jews -- long the three main power sources for American literary energy. Neverth
eless, the most important development in publishing of the past 25 years is cert
ainly the boom in writers of quite different ethnic backgrounds. Amy Tan (The Jo
y Luck Club), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine), Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Pl
ay Songs of Love), Gish Jen, Cynthia Kadohata, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros,
Cristina Garcia, Leslie Marmon Silko and many others deservedly earned both plau
dits and popular success for their fiction, much of it about the clash between t
raditional family values and the allures of mainstream America. Above all, Afric
an-American fiction took off in the '80s following the runaway success of Alice
Walker's The Color Purple and the deeper mastery of Toni Morrison (crowned in 19

93 with a Nobel Prize in literature). [See Jabari Asim's essay about African-Ame
rican literature.]
In some ways, this renaissance in "multicultural" writing reflects the ongoing g
lobalization of American reading habits. During this past quarter-century we hav
e raptly identified with the heroes of books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman R
ushdie, Milan Kundera, Laura Esquivel, Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro, Isabel Allen
de, Chinua Achebe, and Patrick Suskind. Increasingly, literary boundaries -- bet
ween nations, between genres -- are breaking down and Americans are eagerly join
ing the transnational reading public that frequents the Library without Walls.
This barrier-bashing also extends to more intimate matters. Over the past 25 yea
rs, gay novelists have benefited from, and often championed, a fiction that more
fully reflects the variety of human sexual experience. Writers such as the mult
i-talented Edmund White, Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance), James McCourt
(Time Remaining), and David Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes) have acquired
a mass readership, even with books resolutely focused on gay life. The onset of
AIDS obviously drained some of the high spirits out of gay fiction, replacing th
e angst and elation of coming out with anguish over the death of loved ones. Hen
ce the late, alas, Paul Monette achieved his greatest fame neither for his screw
ball comic novel Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll nor his poetry, but for his sorrowf
ul memoir Borrowed Time. Lesbian fiction has also blossomed in the 1980s and '90
s, frequently in detective stories and fantasy, and in a new vogue for erotic wr
iting by women (see Carole Maso's recent Aureole).
Mysteries, historical novels and other forms of genre storytelling have emerged
from their own closets during the three past decades. Romance fiction, such as D
iana Gabaldon's thrilling Outlander, swept onto bestseller lists. In Lonesome Do
ve Larry McMurtry elevated the Western into a folk epic, and Pete Dexter nearly
matched him in Deadwood. Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and The Crossin
g -- the first installments of the not-yet-complete Border trilogy -- set coming
-of-age stories against the kind of grim Tex-Mex background of Sam Peckinpah's b
loody film "The Wild Bunch." Paul Auster's New York trilogy (City of Glass, Ghos
ts, The Locked Room) transmuted hard-boiled detective stories into compulsively
readable metaphysical mysteries. Since its publication Michael Shaara's The Kill
er Angels, a deeply authentic-seeming recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg, ha
s been frequently named the best American novel about war since The Red Badge of
Courage. By contrast, Toni Morrison's Beloved retold a different, perhaps even
more horrific Civil War story, in which a mother commits infanticide to save her
child from a life of slavery. The versatile George Garrett produced, to critica
l acclaim, two of his three richly evocative Elizabethan novels, The Succession
and Entered from the Sun.
Meanwhile, Harry Crews took up the Southern grotesquerie of Flannery O'Connor an
d fused it with the redneck storytelling of an Erskine Caldwell: Car focuses on
a man's attempt to eat a Ford Maverick, and Body boldly travels into the bizarre
alternate universe of professional musclemen and -women. Similarly, John Hawkes
, widely admired for his icy style, continued to blend elements of Gothic, exper
imental and erotic fiction into his own dark vision of love and family life (Tra
vesty). Even Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, an enormous popular succes
s, loosely modeled itself after a Victorian triple-decker to portray the reprehe
nsible movers and shakers of contemporary New York life.
Two of the most sheerly enjoyable genre works of our period also proved quietly
revolutionary: George V. Higgins's street-smart, ear-perfect Boston crime novel
The Friends of Eddie Coyle and William Gibson's hard-wired sf classic Neuromance
r: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
" The Higgins inspired Elmore Leonard -- the most highly regarded crime novelist
of the '80s -- and a host of epigoni; the Gibson gave rise to numerous accounts
of lowlife hustlers in a high-tech future. It has, in fact, been a great age fo

r both these popular genres. Think of the wry thrillers of Ross Thomas (Chinaman
's Chance, The Singapore Wink), the easygoing mastery of Donald Westlake (partic
ularly in the Dortmunder capers), the versatile Ed McBain and Lawrence Block, th
e complex espionage and Washington novels of Charles McCarry, not to pass over t
he more ambitious, if more uneven, work of Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke, an
d Sue Grafton. For many readers James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss stands out as
the most emotionally powerful American private-eye novel since Ross Macdonald's
The Chill.
Though Gibson owns the cyberpunk trademark, the most admired sf writer of the pa
st quarter-century is the productive Ursula Le Guin, at once feminist, Jungian,
funny and wise. Thomas M. Disch and Samuel R. Delany -- twin giants of the Ameri
can New Wave -- both cracked the sf glass ceiling during the 1980s, Disch reveal
ing a dazzling talent for everything from children's books (The Brave Little Toa
ster) to satirical horror fiction (The M.D.), Delany transforming himself into a
post-modernist critic and experimental novelist (the Neveryon books). Philip K.
Dick -- "our own homegrown Borges," in Le Guin's words -- may have died in 1982
(though who can be sure with this writer?), but his work proved a pervasive fin
-de-siecle influence, in part through reissues of his novels (The Man in the Hig
h Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and publication of his letters a
nd manuscripts. His vision of a dirty, overcrowded slum world, where everything
is gradually falling apart, is now the way most of us imagine the 21st century.
Dick has seen the future and nothing works.
But there are scarier tableaux. Thomas Harris's two eye-popping horror novels, R
ed Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, have been acclaimed as the period's mast
erpieces of dark suspense by no less than Stephen King, himself a virtual force
of nature, amazingly fecund, inventive and, like other prolific authors, sometim
es undervalued and denigrated. Starting with The Land of Laughs, Jonathan Carrol
l's artful novels depict American expatriates and Eurotrash caught up in nightma
rish fairy tales: Vanity Fair meets Weird Tales, as I said in a review of Sleepi
ng in Flame. Art Spiegelmann's haunting Maus earned plaudits for its depiction o
f the Holocaust in terms of mice and cats, and, along with Harvey Pekar's grimly
humorous American Splendor, helped win for comics a new audience and respectabi
lity.
The Big Picture
Not surprisingly, the least successful subgenre of fiction since 1972 has also b
een its most ambitious: the mega-novel. Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, Norman M
ailer's Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost, Harold Brodkey's long-anticipated,
intermittently readable The Runaway Soul -- all were seriously disappointing: lo
gorrhea in excelsis. John Barth's epistolary LETTERS, the sprawling fiction of W
illiam Vollmann, Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, and David Foster Wall
ace's recent Infinite Jest were admired with reservations, as were two of my fav
orites: Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew and Gass's The Tunnel. Perhaps only William G
addis (A Frolic of His Own), Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon) and one or two other
s have managed to create wholly successful mega-novels. And even they have their
detractors. In a real sense, though, these grand undertakings are the books tha
t matter most. As Italo Calvino once wrote, "Overambitious projects may be objec
tionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if
we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement."
There are many more authors I should like to mention, from Robert Stone and Robe
rt Coover to the exuberant Paul West and the much-honored Carol Shields -- not t
o overlook such personal favorites as W.M. Spackman and Felipe Alfau, the witty
and tricksy Harry Mathews, the irreplaceable Avram Davidson . . . But one must s
top somewhere.
As we glide toward the millennium, it is obvious that the radical developments i

n fiction will increasingly draw their energies and inspiration from computer hy
pertext, the cyberspace Garden of Forking Paths. The next 25 years should be exc
iting ones. [See David Nicholson's essay on page 23.] But what final judgment ca
n we make of this past quarter-century? I see, in truth, a small shelf of remark
able works, though only a few feel as permanent as The Great Gatsby, The Sound a
nd the Fury, Lolita or Invisible Man. But give the others time. You never know.
The people who bemoan the death of the novel simply haven't read enough of them.
After looking back at such variety and accomplishment, I can willingly echo Ezr
a Pound's famous remark about his own famous generation: "It is after all a grrr
rreat litttttterary period."
Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World.
Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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