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Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970.(Book Review)
Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 2970. By KENNETH MILLARD. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. viii + 328 pp. 10.99 [pounds sterling]. 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 for a 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. Kenneth 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 twentieth-century fiction of the United States in a single survey ...
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