What Happened and What Didn't Happen: Contemporary American Fiction in Retrospect

Abstract

What Happened and What Didn't Happen:Contemporary American Fiction in Retrospect Sarah Graham (bio) Samuel Cohen , After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. 250 pp. $39.95. Interviewed just after the publication of Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo commented that Americans in the final years of the twentieth century were "in between two historical periods, the Cold War and whatever it is that follows it. . . . [W]e're just beginning to wonder what happened, and what didn't happen."1 Samuel Cohen heads the afterword of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s with DeLillo's words, but the quotation would work as well at the beginning of his study, because much of Cohen's analysis is focused on those novels published after the cold war that sought to reassess the dominant narrative of decades of Soviet-U.S. antagonism. To this end, Cohen explores in detail five historical novels published in the 1990s: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997), Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (1994), and Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted (1996); in less detail, he considers Don DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen also engages with two novels he deems "post-9/11" narratives: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002) and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (2003). [End Page 574] Cohen's central argument is that the period between the end of the cold war in 1989 and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was one of tranquility and security in America, a breathing space after the pervasive fears of a cold war that neither brought to fruition the terror of Mutually Assured Destruction nor ever receded enough for comfort. The commonplace observation that historical fiction is as much about the present from which it emerges as the past that it depicts is undoubtedly true of the texts discussed here. Cohen argues that the 1990s brought a retrospective mood to American culture, provoking some writers to reconsider and revise, to counter the triumphalism evident at the end of the cold war. Cohen's title echoes Francis Fukuyama's famed polemic of 1992, and his thesis counters the complacency apparently implied by Fukuyama's insistence that, after the cold war, the world was free to pursue capitalism within democracy, since history as characterized by clashing ideological extremes was now over.2 In place of international war, the nineties saw "culture wars" between liberals and conservatives that played out within and beyond the political arena. Whatever their personal politics, when Pynchon, Roth, Morrison, and the other novelists whom Cohen considers bring into question dominant accounts of how the past became the present, they inevitably challenge traditional conceptualizations of history as a matter of cause and effect, of single truths and inevitable outcomes. Such querying of consensus opens history up to reinterpretations that bring different outcomes or no clear conclusion at all. Implicitly, when the past is reimagined or mined for other voices and perspectives, the present and future become much less stable, since they are no longer anchored to a singular model of the past. Given such uncertainty, who, if anyone, can be deemed the "[b]ig winner" in international [End Page 575] contests, as one of DeLillo's Soviet characters comments sardonically?3 Cohen suggests that, as the cold war mood began to thaw and the present seemed to no longer require constant vigilance, the luxury of retrospect was granted. This retrograde perspective apparently countered the desire to see the era after glasnost as a fresh start: as Cohen notes, the 1990s instead saw several fifty-year anniversaries (including Pearl Harbor and the end of the Second World War) and a rash of nostalgic films and television programming, not least in the rise of the extended historical documentary. Cohen further argues that many events of the 1990s were contextualized by key debates of the 1960s, centering as they did on race (Rodney King, O. J. Simpson); gender (Anita Hill, Bill Clinton); and internal dissent and violence (the Oklahoma City bombing). Toni Morrison (born in 1931...