Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction since 1960

by Marc Chénetier

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

Genres: Criticism

337 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 1996

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has had a permanent place on my writing desk for going on twenty years now because it looks at American fiction through so many different lenses. Just incredibly stimulative for writing ideas and approaches and new things to look for when going back to books I've read before or to seek out writers I haven't read. Great to browse for fifteen minutes and easy to get lost in for and hour or more and even better for then rushing over to the bookshelf to follow-up on some of Chenetier's analyses. Has the benefit of an outsider (French) looking in on American fiction and thus untethered from American literary and cultural politics. Does come with some French literary and post-structuralist theory baggage, but also does not let that get in the way of absorbing the sheer welter of approaches American writers used in the 60's, 70's and 80's (the book was first published in the 1989).

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

A French perspective on what was an enormous boom in fiction in the Usofa, post-1960. Running up to 1989-ish and thus not assimilating the post-1987 generation (WTV, DFW, et al). Chénetier begins his story with Hawkes and Gaddis. So you know what course he will steer ; relegating many of those popular/famous names to the pre-60s generation. And I rejoyce to see so many discussions of novels pub'd by Fiction Collective & FC2 ; which makes this volume a great source for your unEARTH'ing activities. Cites frequently from Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists and wraps up with Bakhtin, so you know he knows what a novel is.