State Of American Fiction

Real Ray · Nov 15, 2003

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1085374,00.html

American abundance - shameless excess and unslakeable appetite and greedy, pile-it-high super-abundance - these were the defining qualities of the last, splurging American century. In his 1985 novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo writes in a tone at once mocking and applauding about the new late-century ritual of whole families shopping at night: "Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki . . . I shopped with reckless abandon . . . I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it . . . I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me . . . We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak."

Travelling through the former slave states of the American South for a book at around the same time, VS Naipaul became increasingly diverted by the incidence of "very fat people, people who had risen (like dough) to special spheres of obesity - gargantuan, corridor-blocking"; people who "had turned fulfilment and the glory of abundance to personal fat, fat as a personal possession". "It was at times a pleasure and an excitement to see them," Naipaul noted in A Turn in the South (1989), "to see the way each individual human frame organised or arranged its excess poundage: a swag here, a bag there, a slab there, a roll there. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed; but I also began to wonder . . . whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasn't, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion."

Although he nowhere suggests it, it is possible that Naipaul - so famously rigorous, so calorie-conscious as a prose stylist, so particular and self-denying (and as slyly satirical as DeLillo) - intended this to stand as a metaphor for the kind of showy, dukes-up, and (as he would see it) disfiguringly steroid-dependent writing, tangy with chemical additives and flavour enhancers, that has been the common currency of American fiction for the last fifty years.
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Some interesting points to chew over.

DoctorJones24 · Nov 19, 2003

"...the kind of showy, dukes-up, and (as he would see it) disfiguringly steroid-dependent writing, tangy with chemical additives and flavour enhancers...."

Sounds like Joyce to me.

"If Augie March is the first major novel knowingly written in American rather than English - if its job is "to make you feel how beautiful American is", as Martin Amis has fairly maintained..."

Huck Finn took care of that long before.

"DeLillo, like his immediate contemporary Thomas Pynchon and, before Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, has always been a cerebral, concept-driven writer, and experimental in a sense. He belongs to the generation which produced the metafictions of William Gass, William Gaddis, Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme. Sometimes surreal, sometimes parodic, these were invariably rebarbative, wilfully "difficult" texts, each trying to establish an avant-garde position out beyond realism."

This generation also produced Vonnegut and Updike and Morrison, though. I think this writer has a pretty narrow sense of the landscape of American fiction.

EDIT: Don't mean to sound dismissive. It was an enjoyable read, and there is stuff to chew on. But West Wing is about to start...