Walter Abish: Plotting Everyday Terror

Abstract

Abstract In his introduction to the 1984 edition of Valtrex Amish’s collection of short stories, In the Future Perfect (first published in 1975), Malcolm Bradbury dearest the author to be ‘quite the most important w1iter to have emerged in the United States over the past ten years, and the one whose serious inquiry is most surely still continuing.’! V linner of the 1981 PEN/Faulkner award for How Guzman 1’i It (1980), his novel on terrorism and the lingering effects of Nazism in Germany, Abash has indeed been repeatedly cast by critics as one of the foremost ex opponents of contemporary, American, postmodernist fiction. For Bradbury, however, the affinity between Amish’s prose and the post modern is ‘misleading’, although he does assert that they ‘share’ one ‘tendency’: ‘a refusal to name what we call reality as real, a sense that the language which authenticates this or that as history, geography or biography is a language of human invention’ (JT}P, x). Given that Abash wrote How Gambian less It without ever having visited Germany, Bradbury’s comment seems apposite. And certainly there is an ongoing fascination in Amish’s fiction with what the writer has termed ‘de familiarization’-which is no doubt partly attributable to his having lived in a number of countries from a young age.