The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980

248 Pages·2010·1.08 MB·English

by  Patrick O'Donnell

The American Novel Now

The American
Novel Now
Reading Contemporary American
Fiction Since 1980
Patrick O’Donnell
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition fi rst published 2010
© 2010 Patrick O’Donnell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Donnell, Patrick, 1948–
The American novel now : contemporary American fi ction since 1980 / Patrick O’Donnell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-6757-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6755-0 (pbk. :
alk. paper) 1. American fi ction–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and
society–United States–History–20th century. 3. Literature and history–United States–
History–20th century. I. Title. II. Title: Contemporary American fi ction since 1980.
PS379.O35 2010
813′.5409–dc22
2009030168
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 10.5 on 13 pt Galliard by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed in Malaysia
1 2010
For Kaylee and Caiden, future readers

Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xii
Part I: Before 1980 1
Part II: From New Realisms to Postmodernism 34
“This American Life” 35
“Dirty Realisms” 46
Only Wor(l)ds 56
Magnifying Reality, Multiplying Genre 67
Part III: Becoming Identities 80
Reinventing Character 82
Racing Identity 92
Engendering Narrative 104
Toward the Posthuman 115
Part IV: What Happened to History? 124
The Past is Prologue 126
Tunneling In 132
Imagining Epoch 136
Another History 146
Narrating Vietnam 150
Catastrophe: The Ends of History 162
Part V: Relations Stopping Nowhere 172
The Postnuclear Family 173
The Reach of Community 187
From There to Here: Migration and Nation 199
Epilogue 213
Notes 216
References 220
Index 228
Preface
The narrative that follows, like any narrative, is full of gaps, elisions,
inclusions and exclusions. I have been teaching contemporary Ameri-
can fi ction to undergraduate and graduate students for over thirty
years, and if there is an overriding lesson taught by the remarkable
proliferation of styles, subjects, experiments in genre, innovations, and
revisions of tradition that have taken place in the American novel since
World War II, it is that any attempt to encompass the fi eld of this
work or to treat it as a totality is foolhardy. More to the point, such
an effort would run counter to what the fi ction itself teaches us: that
we live in an increasingly complex world where language and the
distortions of language, identity and its discontents, speech, object and
affect are only apprehensible in their specifi city and within the particu-
lar contexts they inhabit, and only then by means of the partial view
that pertains to being human at a time when “ the human ” itself is
under question. The best work of the imagination attends fi rst to the
particular, compelling the reader to enlarge her or his worldly perspec-
tive as the consequence of a local reading.
A narrative that attempts to draw out several of the signifi cant fi la-
ments of the contemporary American novel since 1980 will, of neces-
sity, shed light on the few rather than the many, but with the intention
to focus on the few that offer exemplary instances of what will emerge
in the long view of literary history over time as paradigmatic develop-
ments. The reader is cautioned that only a fraction of the contempo-
rary American novelists since the late 1970s he or she may consider
interesting or signifi cant are discussed or cited in this volume: even
just mentioning in a sentence or two all of the contemporary American