The Reading Experience

Detecting a Wrongness

In his review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, Hari Kunzru maintains that what separates this novel from the postmodern novels Lethem clearly admires is that "it’s too good-humored to attain real satiric bite and is often content to drop a name instead of wrestling with the slippery ideas that might make Lethem’s heroes worthy of a true fan’s regard." This is probably right, although to say that the novel lacks "satiric bite" doesn't mean it is not still essentially an attempt at satire, just as it's true that while Chronic City doesn''t especially wrestle with "slippery ideas," the claim that so-called "systems novels"--a term coined by Thomas LeClair in his book on Don DeLillo, In the Loop--can be defined by their own grappling with such ideas is altogether questionable.

Lethem's work is often associated with the first generation postmodernists, particularly Pynchon, Barth, and DeLillo, as mediated by the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and superhero comic books. This amalgamation of high postmodernism and popular literature seems to be, in fact, what most readers and critics take to be his signature variation on postmodernism in fiction. However, while it may be the case that Lethem is inspired by the postmodernists to create his brand of literary fantasy fiction, there isn't much that's especially innovative about a book like Chronic City. It seems more like a tired pastiche of postmodernism than an attempt to extend the reach of postmodern experiment into a different era and changed circumstances.

Kunzru maintains that Lethem "knows he’s writing belatedly and wants us to know he knows" and that this gesture perhaps makes the novel "a conscious tribute of some kind, a love letter to the writing that inspired Lethem to become a writer." If John Barth initiated postmodernism by positing a "literature of exhaustion" that exploited the "used-upness" of fictional form to generate new forms, Kunzru's suggestion might indicate that Lethem is in his own way converting postmodernism itself into an "exhausted" source of formal development, at least for his own work, except that, where Barth and company forced a new attention on form, style, and narrative strategy, Lethem settles for vaguely surreal machinations of plot (providing what some want to call an "alternative reality") and loudly "colorful" characters (most of them given obviously Pynchon-derived names). There is otherwise nothing that could be called formal innovation in a novel like Chronic City, nothing that really challenges readers to examine their assumptions about the form.

Lethem's status as an experimental writer, then, seems entirely based on his incorporation of genre fiction narrative conventions into novels that have generally been accepted as "serious" fiction.  The plot devices of detective stories and science fiction allow Lethem to ostensibly bypass the requirements of ordinary realism, providing for an approach that blends caricature and pseudo-fantasy to produce what in my view can best be described as whimsy. But whimsy is not exactly a postmodern mode, and in Chronic City it betrays a certain aesthetic timidity. I think I agree with William Deresiewicz, who in his review of the novel comments that Lethem "wants realism, with the credibility it brings--wants us to take the world of the novel as a faithful copy of the world we know--but he also wants to stack the deck by deploying supernatural elements whenever he finds it convenient." Thus the New York City portrayed in the narrative needs to be recognizable enough as New York City that we are able to associate the events and themes with the real place but not so much that the author can't introduce runaway tunnel robots, an illusory space mission doomed by the presence of Chinese space mines, or snow in August.

This sort of contained fantasia can't really be what the postmodernists had in mind as an alternative to conventional realism, nor is it credible as a revision or reorientation of postmodern challenges to inherited practice. It implies that postmodern experiment was simply a strategy designed to undermine the principle of verisimilitude, so that any work not strictly observing the rules of traditional realism could be called "experimental." And while Lethem's work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn't so much that the novel is short on "satiric bite" as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists. The postmodern comedy in the work of Pynchon or Barth or Barthelme doesn't seek to "correct" behaviors and institutions that threaten individual autonomy or impede social progress; it portrays such threats and obstructions as inherent to human life and thus unfortunately not much subject to amelioration.

Darby Dixon expresses his disappointment with Chronic City as perhaps the consequence of his own inability as a reader to "patiently dissect its meaning and formulate its connections," to "place [its] ideas and themes on pedestals in whose shadows lurk plot and character." This assumes that what is really at work in this novel is an underlying deep structure of "meaning" and "ideas" the reader must uncover. It further implies that what must make it a suitably postmodern work is precisely this deep structure of "connection." But neither does Lethem's novel conceal any deep meaning not made apparent through choice of satirical targets, nor is this undertow of supposedly abstruse "matter" what animates postmodern fiction. The story of the relationship between narrator Chase Insteadman, former child actor, and Perkus Tooth, former bohemian intellectual now pothead, allows Lethem to canvass his "alernative" New York from top (Insteadman is something of a mascot for the city's high-society types) to bottom and to adjust his satirical focus accordingly. That the purport of the novel's "ideas and themes" doesn't go much beyond this surface satire is in its favor, as we aren't subjected to the kind of tedium the exploration of "ideas" in fiction usually entails. In this way Lethem is actually faithful to his postmodern predecessors: to the extent Barth or Pynchon or DeLillo incorporate ideas, they do so as inspiration for formal or narrative devices ("entropy" in Pynchon's story of that name, for example) rather than as abstractions with which to "wrestle."

However, Chronic City nevertheless suffers from its own kind of tedium, exactly of the sort Darby Dixon identifies when he admits he found it simply "boring." Chronic City never attains the structural or stylistic vitality that would be required for us to suspend our disbelief in its plot contrivances. Its narrative drags along and its narrator's language is leaden and unnecessarily prolix to the extent that I mostly had to force myself to finish the book. The narrator is himself an unengaging figure whose status as a blank slate on which his friend Perkus inscribes a more capacious understanding does not make him a character with whom one wants to spend over 450 pages. And Perkus himself is much less interesting than Lethem wants him to be. He's an essentially stock countercultural type--he likes to discourse on "Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, the Mafia's blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker," etc., etc., etc.--and his recurrent cluster headaches and other mental problems make him seem merely pathetic, not heroic.

In his review of Chronic City, Ron Charles acknowledges it is "a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity," but he nonetheless thinks Lethem "proves he's one of the most elegant stylists in the country," offering "perfectly choreographed sentences." I have in the past found Lethem a pleasing enough stylist, but the style exhibited through Chase Insteadman produces sentences that are anything but "perfectly choreographed." Here's Chase in one of his moments of reflection:

I'm outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don't mean only to myself; it's frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social facade--to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I'm like fudge. Or maybe I'm like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I'm screaming inside, for if I was, I'd soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate. He wouldn't have meant it kindly.

I could have settled for the first sentence. Or perhaps "Perkus would have called me inchoate." These descriptions tell me what I need to know about Insteadman (to the extent I need to have Insteadman telling me about himself in the first place). The rest is just prattle, and by the time I get to "I detect a wrongness" and the politeness infesting a layer "between me and myself" I just want him to shut up.

This sort of inexhaustible self-examination and droning exposition occurs throughout the narrative and more than anything else accounts for the lackluster reading experience Chronic City turned out to be. Perhaps it is a sign of the author trying too hard to create "meaning" and forge "connections," but I don't think so. I think it's just Lethem's failure to execute his "alternative reality" into something more than a labored fantasy.

Seeking Out Experts

In a recent Howard Kurtz column in the Washington Post about the disappearance of newspaper critics, Terry Teachout is quoted as maintaining that "there will always be a place for literate, well-informed drama criticism about performances taking place in Chicago or L.A. or St. Louis. You can't outsource that function." And it's not just drama criticism that will continue to need the local perspective: "It's not enough to have a reporter who says the local museum has bought a new Picasso. It's also necessary to have someone on your staff who knows whether it's museum-quality and is worth $5 million."

Terry Teachout has long been a proponent of web-based criticism of all kinds, so I don't take his comments as the defensive posturing of an endangered critical species so common among print-based critics but as an honest assessment of the limitations of the online medium and the niche-oriented role newspaper arts coverage might continue to play. However, I still think he's not likely to prove correct in his contention that only local newspapers will be able to provide reliable commentary on local arts events.

The premise of this argument seems to be that only a reporter-critic hired by a newspaper can afford to devote the time and attention needed to survey all of the theatrical productions and art exhibitions being offered in specific cities. A further assumption is that only a few such critics with insight into Picasso's oeuvre are available and that the local newspaper is the most convenient place to put them. As Teachout puts further puts it in a post at his own blog, "blogging, valuable though it can be, is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately."

I can't see that either of these assumptions is warranted. I can well imagine that, absent arts critics in the local papers, any number of motivated arts enthusiasts might attempt to take up the slack through regionally-oriented blogs, or might even start up online review pages focused exclusively on the local scene (see this effort at The Arts Fuse already under way). Furthermore, I see no reason to believe that "literate, well informed," even "expert" critics can't be found among such enthusiasts. Surely in cities of even modest size, especially those that are home to respectable colleges and universities, there are more knowledgeable and discerning proto-critics than the bias toward print "arts journalism" otherwise allows. If the book blogosphere has demonstrated anything, it is that such capable critics do indeed exist, even if the monopoly on book commentary always exercised by newspapers and magazines obscured that fact.

It is also conceivable that book reviewing concentrating on books by writers with a local connection might become more common--indeed, as I canvass the remaining newspaper book review sections this already seems to be happening there. Perhaps these sections will hold on as sources of local literary interest, but it they do, it will likely be through reliance on the resources of local critics, precisely the cohort that could just as easily be hosting blogs. One could say that the newspaper makes these critics more readily accessible, and confers on them an inherent credibility, but eventually the best web-based criticism, both local and national, will find its audience, and the audience will find it, because readers interested enough in criticism of books and the arts to seek it out will recognize "literate, well-informed" voices when they hear them.

Explain Yourself

Perhaps the most debilitating limitation of the book review, at least as practiced in American newspapers and most magazines, is that too often critical judgment is pronounced in the absence of articulated standards. Underlying assumptions about what makes for a "good novel," and thus assumptions about what makes fiction worthwhile in the first place, are left unstated, even when those assumptions are clearly implicated in the judgment rendered. This is first of all the consequence of the enforced conventions of the form itself, which appear to proscribe explicit discussion of assumed standards, presumably to give reviews a facade of objectivity (as if criteria of judgment are so well known it's only a bother to mention them) and ward off the possibility they might become too "academic." But reviewers also frequently seem all too ready to embrace these conventions and advance conclusions whose premises are allowed to go unexamined.

Two recent reviews illustrate the problem, although one relies on an unstated assumption in order to praise while the other does so to find fault. Ed Champion's Philadelphia Inquirer review of Donald Westlake's Memory wants to commend the novel as "pulp" but as pulp with something else, something identifiably literary. Critics of mystery fiction, Ed mantains, deny that it can deliver "thematic truths and behavioral insight." Westlake's book shows that this objection does not always hold up, since Memory displays "serious thematic concerns."

Of course, the assumption here is that "literary" fiction can properly be defined as that containing "thematic truths and behavioral insight." Granted, Ed is countering what he thinks is a critical dismissal itself bound to this assumption, but the phrasing really seems to be Ed's gloss on the criticisms made of a form of fiction otherwise focused on "plot-oriented puzzles." If it's too heavy on "plot" and "puzzles," it must be too light on "substance," which must mean "theme" or "insight." It's a common enough opposition, but rather than trying to break it down, by, say, making a case that "plot-oriented puzzles" have their own kind of substance, especially in pulp fiction, Ed unfortunately adopts it to his own purposes and in extolling the work of Donald Westlake reinforces the notion that "literature" is equivalent to "theme."

In a review of Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs, Floyd Skloot perpetuates some equally damaging stereotypes, in this case about experimental fiction. According to Skloot, in his dedication to his "experiments with the devices of fiction" McGregor sacrifices "emotional engagement with his characters and story." His devices call attention to themselves, become "showy." His characters lack "sufficient character and depth to distinguish them" and "scenes that should be unbearably emotional. . .fall flat, because we have no visceral connection with the characters." Ultimately the novel fails because the author does not "let us lose ourselves in it."

There is here a virtual taxonomy of the book McGregor should have written but, in the reviewer's opinion, unaccountably did not. This book is pretty clearly a conventional novel full of "emotional engagement" with fully-drawn characters that preserves narrative transparency and allows us to easily suspend our disbelief. These things are what real novels should be doing, and McGregor's novel can't possibly be judged successful simply because it tries to do something else.

The reviewer has every right to prefer his projected shadow-novel, but if he can't be expected to assess the novel he's actually been given to review according to the criteria appropriate to it, either he shouldn't have been assigned the novel to review in the first place or he should be obligated to acknowledge that his standards preclude considering Even the Dog a legitimate novel at all, preclude considering alternative standards for a novel that manifestly demands them, and that the flaws he delineates are really just the markers of his own projection. He might be given the opportunity to defend his standards, and to explain why McGregor's novel should still be subjected to them, but he can't do that if he can't, or won't, declare those standards directly.

Reviews such as these help sustain the illusion that the boundaries of the "literary" are well-known and that the principles of criticism are so well-settled they merely need to be applied consistently. These illusions need to be dispelled, not encouraged, but the protocols of "literary journalism" as it now exists probably aren't going to contribute much to that effort.

Turning Pages

Sven Birkerts has been developing a critique of "electronic media" for quite a long time, publishing The Gutenberg Elegies in 1994, well before the rise of blogs, stand-alone news sites, and critical webzines, so his cyber skepticism is not to be dismissed as simply more defensive posturing by an endangered gatekeeper. I have myself taken issue with some of Birkerts's more uninformed outbursts, but his concern for "unhurried" reading is usually expressed in an equally unhurried analysis of the act of reading (specifically reading fiction), not as the high dudgeon of a book critic protesting his imminent loss of status.

This is especially true of a recent essay by Bikerts in The American Scholar, "Reading in a Digital Age." The essay is framed as yet another inquiry into the way the digital information "environment" is making serious reading harder to accomplish, but ultimately it is really a candid inquiry into his own reading habits and an attempt to generalize from his conclusions to a theory of sorts both about reading and about the nature of fiction. Much of this theory seems to me perceptive, and generally correct, but parts of it as well seem an overly roundabout way of describing our experience of fiction that would benefit from a consideration of John Dewey's own "experiential-phenomenological" analysis in Art as Experience. There is overlap between the accounts offered by Dewey and Birkerts, but finally Dewey's comes closer to doing full justice to the role of "imagination" in reading, both writer's and reader's.

Birkerts associates imagination with the mental state of "contemplation," which he in turn contrasts with "analytic thought." Contemplation is "intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself"; analytic thought  "is transitive, is goal directed. . .a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation." Contemplation is, or should be, the preferred mode of reading fiction, by which "enhancement" and "deepening," end-states in themselves, are achieved. But Birkerts finds this "deepening" moving in just one direction: the purpose of fiction "is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself."

Birkerts's insistence that the reading of fiction leads to experience and not "explanation" is wholly appropriate and does seem to coincide with Dewey's contention that art is an "enhancement" of experience. However, while Dewey might accept "sensibility" as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity "to enage the mind," especially if this means a retreat into an "inwardness" that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place. A Deweyan representation of the reading experience (the experience of art in general) would balance the inwardness Birkerts evokes with an outwardness that also seeks satisfaction in the perception of form and style. If "contemplation" involves the heightened awareness both of the palpable qualities of the created work and of our own awareness of those qualities, then the term might accurately capture the nature of aesthetic experience, but I think Birkerts privileges the activity of "mind."

When Birkerts writes that fiction provides "an arena of liberation. . .where mind and imagination can freely combine," he is not describing an interaction between the reader's "sensibility" and the the work as an act of imagination but is positing "mind" and "imagination" as faculties exercised by the reader. When a little later he allows that "I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension," it seems to me he is explicitly discounting the artistic shaping that is finally the role of "author." In merging the author and his characters, Birkerts is putting most value on fiction's ability to induce "empathy," which in his case means the opportunity to connect with another "mind": "It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source and location." It is presumably this proximity to the "other" as evoked in fiction that constitutes "imagination" for Bikerts, not the unencumbered immersion in aesthetic experience as a whole.

On the other hand, I do identify with Birkerts's account of the "residue" his reading experiences leave:

. . .the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What does remain is "A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche." "Tonal memory" seems to me a good way of characterizing the lingering impression a strong work of fiction leaves, although it is a memory the work has indeed impressed upon the memory rather than the sort of mechanical effort of "recall" the recounting of plot entails. For myself, not only do I usually have trouble retrieving specific episodes from novels I have read more than a few months in the past, I often enough lose all but a general sense of the voice or behavior of the characters, in the case of minor characters sometimes forgetting their existence altogether. Yet I continue to feel a tangible connection to the "language world" I have encountered, which to me is the surest sign my experience of the text was worthwhile.

The storage model of reading thus threatens to reduce the reading experience to the acquisition of "information," which Birkerts rightly resists. But I would take Birkerts's invocation of the "language world" as the ulimate source of value in fiction even farther. Reading a work of literature should always imply the possibility, even the desirability, of re-reading. Suspension in the language-world rather than the collection of facts about the work is much more likely to encourage later re-reading, both because one wants to abide there again and because the work in its particulars hasn't already been thoroughly assimilated and duly packed away. I can read it again and still have a worthwhile literary experience. (Presumably Birkerts might think that re-reading would give him further insight into the author's "psyche" as well; I cannot accept this particular element of his theory of reading, as I cannot see how the created language-world that is the text could possibly reveal anything about the actual author's mental states, except through free-floating speculation irrelevant to the text itself, nor why I should care even if it could.)

Birkerts concludes by encapsulating his claim about "deep reading":

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

While there are still assumptions here that seem to me unwarranted--why must the core element of fiction be its "narrative premise," which would only re-introduce "plot" as a barrier between the reader and the "language world"--ultimately this is a credible description of what is involved in serious reading. Unfortunatey, Birkerts seems motivated to offer this description mostly in order to bolster his conviction that this kind of reading is endangered by the transition to screen-reading. I am unconvinced, to say the least. If Birkerts were suggesting that deep reading is succumbing to the general human inclination to give in to distraction, to settle for what's easiest, he would perhaps be on firmer ground, although this weakness has always plagued us and can hardly have been induced by the presence of computers. But he clearly enough wants to insist there is something inherent in cyberspace and e-books that make them inimical to "serious literary work" and the reading it requires.

A generation or two from now, serious readers--and they will still be around--will look back at Birkerts's claims and find them deeply puzzling. They will find the notion that literary texts published on pieces of glued-together paper are somehow metaphysically superior to those published electronically difficult to comprehend. I find it hard to comprehend the idea now. I can understand continuing to find the printed book more convenient, or more comforting,  but to maintain that serious, sustained reading can take place only when enabled by print-on-paper just isn't  plausible. Birkerts is a trustworthy literary critic and a reliable authority on the pleasures of reading, but as a seer into the future of literature he will surely prove inadequate.

 

Premises

Readers of Morris Dickstein's newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, should find it an agreeable survey of the cultural expressions of the 1930s that reveals how the Depression years were portrayed and understood by those living through them. Readers of Dickstein's previous books will recognize its method, a fastidious interrogation of novels, films, and other works of art for their historical resonances and mutual assumptions, their ability to show how an entire culture at a particular time is "thinking." Readers less interested in Dickstein's signature critical approach or in the context his earlier books provide nevertheless could easily enough from Dancing in the Dark be made aware of "Depression culture" in a coherent and often insightful way. Dickstein's painstaking scrutiny of texts for their clues to cultural developments can occaionally get bogged down in some turgid writing, but that he can be an acute analyst of these texts within the framework of a consistentently applied historical criticism is undeniable.

While I don't find this sort of historical criticism invalid--there is ultimately nothing wrong with situating a work of art or literature in its period and cultural mileu, as long as the limits of this strategy as a way to "understand" the work are acknowledged--I do find Dickstein's relentless pursuit of the strategy frequently tedious and finally not much service to literature, although Dickstein often assures us it is. Since a great deal of his criticism has been focused on post-World War II American fiction, I think that Dickstein has especially done some misservice to contemporary fiction, my own critical bailiwick, distorting its achievement and finally reducing it to a function as barometer of the cultural and political changes that have taken place in the United States between 1945 and the present.

I make this criticism regretfully, as Dickstein's 1979 book, Gates of Eden, was probably more responsible for setting me on a path of study of contemporary fiction than any other critical book I read or any course I took. It introduced me to the work of experimental writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme, of whom I don't think I'd ever heard at the time, and although I could sense even when reading the book as a undiscriminating undergraduate that Dickstein didn't entirely approve of their fiction, especially the Barthleme of the late '60s and after, just the suggestion that Barthleme was "radical" (Dickstein meant to associate him with the decadent, Weatherman phase of 60s radicalism) was enough to make me want to read his books posthaste.

Actually, much of Dickstein's analysis of the fiction of the 1960s still holds up, as I disovered when I recently re-read the book, even if the tacit impatience with postmodernism seems more apparent to me now. (The term "postmodernism" is never used, however; Dickstein in 1979 preferred to identify writers like Barth and Barthelme as modernists, emphasizing the continuity between the formal experimentation of modernism and that which came to be called postmodernism. Dickstein thinks that late modernism radicalized itself beyond redemption in the work of writers such as Rudolph Wurlitzer, but while I can't agree that the experimental impulse inevitably leads to an aesthetic impasse, his implicit suggestion that the adventurous writing of the 1960s and 1970s was really a second flowering of modernism usefully emphasizes that "postmodernism" was first of all a phenomenon of literary history, not a reorientation of history itself.) Above all, his recognition that the fiction of the 1960s represents a significant achievement still seems audacious:

In a topsy-turvy age that often turned trash into art and art into trash, that gaily pursued topical fascination and ephemeral performances and showed a real genius for self-consuming artifacts--an age that sometimes valued art too little because it loved raw life too much--novels were written that are among the handful of art-works, few enough in any age, that are likely to endure. It's a bizzare prospect, but the sixties are as likely to be remembered through novels as through anything else they left behind.

Dickstein finds much that is praiseworthy in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and even Barth and Barthleme, despite his judgment that they ultimately take things too far. However ambivalent his reaction to the most adventurous of adventurous fiction, and however much attention he gives to writers whose work will not, in my opinion, "endure," such as Bellow and Mailer, Dickstein's consideration of the experimental fiction of the sixties inspired me at least to take this fiction seriously and to discover for myself whether it produced work "likely to endure."

Unfortunately, the very passage I have quoted, I now see, also signals the real limitations of Dickstein's approach, of the assumptions about fiction's utility as a clue to culture. The last sentence arguably implies that the novels of the era will endure because they are the best way to "remember" the sixties. For those who lived through the era, they will continue to evoke it; for those future readers who did not, they will still enable a cultural "remembering" that will likely allow us to get a glimpse of the kind of "topical" and "ephemeral" attractions Dickstein describes in the rest of the passage. These novels will be "left behind" for scholars and others interested in that "topsy-turvy age" to recreate it, either critically or imaginatively. Fiction is ultimately of value, especially fiction particularly attuned to the social wavelength of its period, as a window onto history. It perhaps enlivens history in a way that straight historical narrative or cultural criticism, cannot, but otherwise it remains an adjunct to the study of culture in its historical manifestations.

My own initial response to Gates of Eden demonstrates that it is possible to read the book as an illuminating appraisal of American fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, but turning to Dickstein's other writing on postwar fiction only confirms that ultimately his purpose seems to be to pin postwar writers down as specimens of their time and place, at best figures in a procession of "tendencies." In the essays "The Face in the Mirror: The Eclipse of Distance in Contemporary Fiction" and "Ordinary People: Carver, Ford and Blue-Collar Realism" (both reprinted in A Mirror in the Roadway, Dickstein's explicit defense of realism), he extends his survey of postwar fiction into the 1970s and 1980s. In the first, he notes a shift in the 1970s toward novels "built around characters who are the very self and voice of the author," exemplified by Philip Roth, William Styron, and John Irving. In the second he discusses the rise of minimalism in the work of Raymond Carver, as well as the subsequent move away from minimalism to "a more expansive, more full-bodied fiction" in the work of Richard Ford and Russell Banks. In the latter he predicts a further shift to "some transformed and heightened version of the social novel." Clearly Dickstein is most interested in contemporary fiction as an opportunity to chart developments in fiction's way of registering social realities. Chronicling the rise and fall of trends in fiction is not necessarily a trivial activity, but in Dickstein's case the single-minded manner in which he pursues the task does threaten to make criticism an intellectual version of fashion journalism.

Leopards in the Temple (2002) is probably Dickstein's summary statement of the historical progression of postwar American fiction. Subtitled "The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970," it again focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, this time treating only fiction but otherwise covering much of the same ground scrutinized in Gates of Eden. The biggest change in approach to the fiction of this period is a considerable narrowing of the the terrain on which Dickstein is willing to cast his critical eye, leaving experimental or postmodern fiction out of view almost completely. He instead devotes most of the book to discussions of well-publicized mainstream writers such as Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Mailer, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, John Updike, Bellow, and Roth, although there are a few welcome considerations of Paul Bowles, Nabokov, Heller, and Vonnegut. Dickstein's implicit dismissal of experimental fiction is perhaps best exemplified in his discussion of John Barth's End of the Road, which Dickstein calls "Barth's best novel" and is included in Leopards in the Temple in the first place mainly because it illustrates the "road" theme Dickstein traces from Kerouac to other writers of the '50s and early '60s. His attitude toward Barth's later metafiction, truly his most important achievement, well beyond End of the Road, is surely encapsulated in his observation that "In Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera Barth's genial narrators soon grow as heartily sick of [their] self-consciousness as we do."

One can legitimately find the work of John Barth and other metafictionists not to one's liking without distorting the fact of its prominence during the period Dickstein is examining. It is hardly credible to suggest that the 1960s are most appropriately represented by Bellow, Malamud, and James Baldwin, which Dickstein does in his final chapter by highlighting their work rather than the postmodern writers, whose work rebelled against the quiescent realism preferred by the gatekeepers of literary culture, much as others rebelled against the constraints of conformity and established practice in other arts and in politics during this time. A survey of the "transformation" of American fiction after World War II that willfully excludes this work is finally hard to take seriously.

Leopards in the Temple posits a postwar literary history that begins with war novelists, proceeds  through the early fiction of certain writers who first came to public attention immediately after the war, such as Vidal and Capote, further through sensation-causing writers such as Kerouac and J.D Salinger, and, with some pauses along the way to acknowledge a few other noteworthy authors, winds up affirming the centrality of culturally sanctioned novelists such as Bellow, Baldwin, and Mailer. Another history of postwar fiction is possible, however, one that begins with, say, John Hawkes, emphasizes Nabokov's work beyond Lolita, carefully considers William Gaddis, includes James Purdy and Thomas Berger along with Joseph Heller, and takes as the apogee of the period the work of Pynchon, Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Dickstein's history is a history of American culture as reflected in his chosen authors and books; the alternative history is more properly a literary history of the years 1945-60, one that focuses on the response of writers to the legacy and the challenges of modernism by extending that legacy through fiction that continued to challenge readers' expectations and that, in my opinion, more accurately encompasses the writers whose work will still likely be read once this period more firmly recedes into literal history.

What now alienates me the most from Dickstein's critical method, however, are the grand generalizations he makes about the practice of fiction, generalizations that interpose great distance between the critic and the texts he/she ostensibly tries to illuminate. He writes, for example, that for novelists of the 1940s and 1950s

They were obsessed more with Oedipal struggle than with class struggle, concerned about the limits of civilization rather than the conflicts within civilization. Their premises were more Freudian than Marxist. . .Auschwitz and Hiroshima had set them thinking about the nature and destiny of man, and relative affluence gave them the leisure to focus on spiritual confusions in their own lives.

How does Dickstein know what "they" were thinking? How can "they," as opposed to individual writers, be thinking anything except insofar as the critic has self-selected a few of "them," invested them with "premises" and speculated about "their" social standing ("relative affluence") and the state of their souls ("spiritual confusions")? Occasionally Dickstein does offer an interesting critical reading of a particular text, as when he observes of Catcher in the Rye that "Holden's adventures in New York are really a series of Jewish jokes, at once sad, funny, and self-accusing," but the overwhelmingly dominant impression left by Leopards in the Temple, and by Morris Dickstein's books as a whole, is that fiction is most worthwhile as a leading indicator not just of just of writers', but an entire culture's temporal obsessions. If I thought this was the foremost reason to read novels, I'd probably never read another one.

ADDENDUM Morris Dickstein has responded to this post in the comment thread below.