`The Novel Is Alive, Of Course'

In the Fall 1978 issue of the literary journal Ploughshares, Roger Sale published an audacious essay, “The Golden Age of the American Novel,” which begins like this:

“The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove this, however, I can only try to say what I think such later evaluators might find in our fiction to praise or even to envy.”

The context here is critical. Thirty years ago, “Theory” was in its ascendancy in the academy and even, sadly, among readers and non-academic critics. “Post-” proliferated. Good sense, scholarship and the joys of reading and writing were already in jeopardy. Sale was working hard to be a celebrator, not an elegist, and he argues a good case. He overestimates the worth of some writers, particularly Mailer, Heller, Pynchon and Robert Stone, but recognizes Bellow as “our finest living novelist” and lauds good novels by less-well-known writers, including Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, Richard Stern’s Golk, Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief and Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall.

Sale is no fuddy-duddy in his tastes. He defines two loose categories – “imperial” (close to James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism”) and “realistic” – and drums up enthusiasm for both modes. Clearly, his sympathies lie with the latter:

“My suspicion is that one reason realistic fiction has never received the attention it deserves is that it is not easy to describe its ways and means, and that the more obviously eccentric, experimental, high flying fictions often make and keep their lofty critical status because they are easier to describe and appreciate. One is always tempted to say that a realistic novel is just there.”

Which is why such writers as William Maxwell and Shirley Hazzard have been ignored by a certain sort of critic or read with incomprehension. The obsession with novelty and self-conscious “experimentalism” (what could be more subtly, deftly “experimental” than Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow?) has blinded some readers to the sublimity of first-rate realistic fiction. Sale again:

“What I'd like to suggest is that the great vitality of the novel at present does not lie simply in those novels which are distinctly different from earlier novels, but in its way of being "realistic" as well, so that the plainest and most straightforward realistic fiction of the last fifteen years or so can be seen as being both distinctly different from earlier realism and allied to the more obviously unrealistic imperial fiction.”

With some sadness I reread Sale’s essay, reprinted in his 1979 collection On Not Being Good Enough. In part, the sadness is personal: I’ll never again read contemporary fiction with the sense of elated discovery I did in the 1960s and 1970s. So many novels and stories seemed new and exciting, in part because my timing was superb. The sadness, however, is also historical: I would have a difficult time mustering a list comparable to Sale’s for the subsequent 30 years. Sale was courageously correct in his assessment of American fiction circa 1978 but – I’m reluctant to say – no longer. The exceptions – Marilynne Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Roth’s 15-year renaissance, a few others – are sadly solitary.

There was a time when I bought new works of fiction by many writers in hard cover as soon as they were published – Nabokov, Bellow, Beckett, Malamud, Singer, Guy Davenport, Pynchon, Gass, sometimes Roth and Updike. No longer. Most are dead or my tastes evolved beyond recognition. I regret sounding gloomy and have tried to find solace in sentences taken out of context from another essay in On Not Being Good Enough, “Mumford and Fuller,” a review of books by and about Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller. He admires Hugh Kenner’s Bucky but with reservation about Fuller’s thinking:

“Having long ago decided that life is not simply a matter of despairing and gloomy occasions, I do not feel moved to decide to live in a world of instances of hope and synergetic pattern either…One can admire them, and live at the heart of empire too, and yet not necessarily want to join in the chorus.”

Any chorus.