American Fictions: 1980-2000: Whose America Is It Anyway?

by Frederick R. Karl

Book by Karl, Frederick R

Genres: Nonfiction

536 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

Along with his biographies, Frederick Karl wrote several volumes of literary criticism, among them American Fictions: 1940-1980. He also was general editor and volume co-editor of the Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, five volumes of which have appeared. He taught at City College of New York, Columbia, and NYU. Karl died in 2004.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Fittingly, for my purposes, Karl ends his two volume 60=year survey of USofAian fiction with discussions of three Mega=Novels :: Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Mason & Dixon (The Tunnel, too). Fittingly, because I feel I'm winding down my own years long reading of the Mega=Novel authors, as depicted in my Familienähnlichkeiten, although I still have a handful of McElroys and Gasses and perhaps some more Powers, definitely Mason & Dixon to reread, all of Vollmann to reread. But I'm itching to head off into other lands and other times, visiting those distant relatives, descendants of Faulkner to our South, precursors of the Mega, Ulysses' of other towns, foreign lands with their own Classical Traditions, more stuff picked up from Moore. But there will be no shortage of Great Work produced in this Land from these several decades.

But I want to leave you with an extended passage from Karl (page 448) which delineates the two Main Streams of USofAian fiction, because it is the delineation I have long employed via my 'AfterJoyce-AfterBeckett-AfterModern' (I should add 'AfterFaulkner') designation for the 'postmodern' novel ::

Overall, what Faulkner provided, whatever the degree of presence, was an opening up, a liberation from narrow realism and naturalism, of the American novel. If we measure his work against that of the other large writers of the 1920s--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Anderson, Dreiser, Lewis, Wharton--Faulkner (perhaps along with a more scattered Gertrude Stein) remains as the sole American writer who infused native traditions with Modernistic practices from abroad. This "opening up," in fact, is precisely what became so dangerous; for American writers separated into those won over by the methods of Modernism and those who have resisted for almost the entire length of their careers.
As for the latter: since writers such as Bellow, Roth, Styron, Oates Malamud, Ellison (to a lesser degree), Mailer, Updike have rejected the inroads of full Modernism and have crafted their work outside its verbal and narrative demands, postwar American fiction has undergone a curious cultural division in the Western world. America is almost the sole country where the dominant novel in terms of popular recognition and exportability has been antithetical to Modernism. What this suggests further, is the sharp division within the American cultural scene where forces of anti-Modernism (virtually the entire literary establishment, reviewers, mainstream critics, etc.) confront those who have absorbed the lessons of writers like Joyce, Eliot, Stein, Pound, Kafka, Woolf. Since Faulkner has himself been such a huge presence in contemporary writers from other countries, we recognize the paradox.

It would appear that Faulkner moved South and got named Magical Realism. That's where I want to go.....

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This is a re-read from 2002.)

Karl's work on the united states novel has always been impressive, especially in the earlier volume that covers 1940-1980. In this successor work he focuses on some of the same figures as before, but also new ones, and has welcome insights on New Realism and the Mega-Novel. He favours Gaddis, Morrison, McElroy, Oates, and Pynchon, and devotes a good chapter to P. Roth and Updike. He also has much to say about Cormac McCarthy.

This book came out in 2001 so it will seem dated. The layout would have been improved and the errors caught (one hopes) by an academic press, and those things detract from the reading experience. But overall this is a good addition to the libraries of those who want to read more about u.s. fiction.