The American New Novel

       In October 1982, New York University and the French Embassy co-sponsored a celebration of the Nouveau roman and a reunion of several of the French New Novelists themselves, who dominated the French literary scene not so long ago and are still vigorously productive: Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, and the younger writer Monique Wittig. As a diplomatic afterthought, the university invited a few U.S. novelists to discuss the influence of the Nouveau roman upon American fiction or, alternatively, the question whether there is an American literary phenomenon comparable to that French one: an American New Novel. The French writers -- every one of whom I admire -- politely attended the American discussion, which opened with statements and brief readings by Jonathan Baumbach, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and myself.

       I have come ail the way from Baltimore to New York to report to you that to the best of my understanding there is no such animal as the American New Novel: not in anything like the sense that we speak of the French Nouveau roman of the 19-late-50s and 60s.

       Certainly among new American novels there is no sign of the American New Novel. I myself have published a new American novel in this calendar year, and as is my custom when that occurs, I keep a little list of who else has done likewise among those of my countrymen upon whom I maintain a watchful eye. That little list includes all three of my fellow panelists: Mr. Baumbach (My Father, More or Less), Mr. Coover (Spanking the Maid), and Mr. Hawkes (Virginie: Her Two Lives). It includes, in chronological order, Saul Bellow, Paul Theroux, John Cheever, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas McGuane, Anne Tyler, John Gardner, Bernard Malamud, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as story collections by I. B. Singer and Ann Beattie. This has been a bountiful American literary year, and there is still a big quarter of it to go: new novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Alice Walker, and a good many more. But I do not detect among these books, several of which are no doubt both good and important, anything resembling a noteworthy new general direction in the U.S. novel.

       Nor do I when I think about what we U.S. novelists have been up to over the last dozen years or so. I suppose that the term Black humorists described something reasonably real and reasonably significant back in the American 1950s. Such later labels as Fabulators and Metafictionists have a certain descriptive power, but what they describe strikes me as comparatively special and minor, rather than a general energizing spirit -- though some individual works tagged with those labels are good works.

       Then there is the adjective postmodern, the meaning of which I have done my best to help confuse. I continue to believe that that adjective describes a very approximately shared inclination among numerous writers and other artists in the second half of our Western twentieth century: an inclination to work out in their individual ways, as I have put it elsewhere, not the next best thing after modernism, but the best next thing after modernism. However, that inclination cuts across national lines; what's more, smarter people than myself have let me know that what I mean by postmodern fiction isn't what the term really means at all. So forget it.

       What else is there? In a conversation recently with a newly notable younger U.S. realist/minimalist short-story writer, who happens also to be an ex-alcoholic, I spoke of another younger U.S. newly notable minimalist/realist short-story writer, whom I learned was also a former alcoholic; our conversation then turned to a third writer, a sometime student of mine, now also a younger ex-alcoholic minimalist et cetera. Since I had been seeing their names lumped together now and then in the Times book supplement, I was moved to coin the term Post-Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism to describe this potentially significant new literary phenomenon. I suppose Gore Vidal would be pleased; he has frequently sneered at what he calls the Alcoholic American Republic of Letters. But it is not my mission in life to please Gore Vidal. In any case, one of those three authors-on-the-wagon, or on the bandwagon, has unfortunately since relapsed, and anyhow they're all mainly short-story writers, not novelists. (In fact -- setting aside the alcohol, the "hyper," and the hype -- I believe the new flowering of the American realist short story, as represented by the likes of Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Stephen Dixon, Barry Hannah, Mark Helprin [a hyperromantic, that one], Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Robison, to be the most noteworthy recent development in American fiction. But so rapidly does the literary weather change, I feel impelled to date this observation 3 P.M., October 2, 1982, and fix the latitude and longitude as well.)

       My friends, what I believe is this: That when it comes to movements, coherent ideologies, and the issuing of articulate position papers, the French arrange these things better. That now and then an authentic phenomenon appears, even in non-Gallic literatures, interesting and homogenous enough to make a few nonridiculous generalizations about; and that the appearance of such phenomena makes life easier for teachers, art historians, and culture watchers -- for anybody interested in understanding and registering what's going on around us, since we can think and talk only with the aid of categories. But I take the tragic view of categories (that they are, though indispensable, more or less arbitrary); and I believe further that inhomogenous, nondescript ideological interregnums, such as novelistic North America may be enjoying presently, may also be fecund for the production of great individual works of art, which are at least as valuable as general aesthetic movements. Since the novel is, of all the genres of literature, perhaps the least categorizable, I believe that it is as likely to thrive in an incoherent period as in a coherent one.

       Therefore I advise the culture not to worry if there is no American New Novel. The culture has more important things to worry about. More to the personal point, I believe that the odds against my writing an excellent new American novel myself, which I aspire to do, are not worsened in such an interregnum, if we are in fact in one. Those odds may even be improved.

       And so I wish the old French New Novel good luck and good health, as I wish the newer Latino literary boom good luck and good health -- with an admiration uncontaminated by envy.

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