Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970 by Kenneth Millard

Abstract

45 o Reviews was campaigning forthe freedom to read. Then, there is the second contender forthe most-censored novel, Huckleberry Finn. Steinle recognizes the relevance of this novel to her subject but again never pursues it, never mentions, forexample, Nat Hentoff's sardonic 1982 novel about this censorship case, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. As a result, although In Cold Fear performs the useful exercise of reminding us of the controversies Salinger's novel has generated, the study only goes a limited way towards explaining why those controversies should have taken place. University of Liverpool David Seed Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970. By Kenneth Millard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. viii + 328pp. ?10.99. ISBN 0-19-871178-6. With the exception of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and a handful of others, all literature is subject to the vagaries of fashion. Even a writer as central to the canon as Dickens was fora time somewhat marginalized by F. R. Leavis's decision that he did not belong to the Great Tradition, and Leavis and T. S. Eliot between them promoted John Donne to, and briefly relegated Milton from, the premier league of English poets. In the field of contemporary American fiction,however, shifts in the reputations of authors are so rapid and radical that constructing any sort of canon is a risky venture. Ken? neth Millard himself points out in his introduction that, of the twenty-two writers discussed in Tony Tanner's City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Cape, 1971), only two (Philip Roth and John Updike) also feature in Contemporary American Fiction. He justifies his decision to omit Pynchon, Mailer, Malamud, Bellow , Barth, Hawkes, Vonnegut, Burroughs, and Heller on the grounds that their 'best and most influential work [.. .] belongs to an earlier period' (p. 3), but does not bother to account for the absence of many of the other writers featured in Tanner's book, presumably because their relative obscurity today automatically disqualifies them from consideration. Whereas in 1971 the future of American fiction seemed likely to belong to ludic postmodernism, with the surreal fiction of writers such as Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan, and the black humour of Vonnegut and Heller all the rage, the resurgence of realism as the prevailing mode of American fiction in the thirty years since then has diminished the reputation of many avant-garde writers, while more traditional (and more versatile) novelists like Updike and Roth have gone from strength to strength. Millard is acutely aware of the fact that any attempt to 'represent late twentiethcentury fiction of the United States in a single survey [. . .] beg[s] questions about cultural value and ideological choices', and that such a survey will inevitably be 'a syn? thesis of differentand competing critical agendas' (p. 3). Because ofthe 'extraordinary proliferation of excellent primary texts', no selection can possibly be comprehensive, and it seems unfair to criticize Millard for his choice of texts, though I cannot help wondering, as a specialist in American-Jewish fiction, why Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Hortense Calisher, and Emily Prager are excluded from the book's lengthy bibliography of canonical American fiction. In so far as Contemporary American Fiction is, as Millard puts it, 'a work of advocacy that hopes to stimulate a passionate engagement with them [the primary texts]' (p. 7), it succeeds admirably. Millard's readings are invariably sensitive and thoughtful , and, considering the very limited space (typically five or six pages) allocated to the discussion of each text, he manages very well to convey a sense of their rich complexity. But here is the problem: critical studies are also subject to the vagaries of fashion, and Millard's book has fallen victim to the current culture in academic MLR, 98.2, 2003 451 publishing in which monographs are out, and textbooks are in. Whereas Tanner was allowed to survey a wide range of writers and at the same time develop a detailed and sophisticated thesis, Millard is clearly constrained by the format of the book he is writing, and by the market he is addressing, so that we are only allowed brief glimpses of where his interests might...