CITY OF WORDS: American Fiction 1950-1970

by Tony Tanner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1971

In V., Thomas Pynchon has a non-character called SHROUD ask the hero of his novel: ""Has it occurred to you that there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?"" What ""it"" represents in American fiction over the last two decades -- the coming Apocalypse or the loss of self or the entropy at the heart of the world or the absurdity of it all -- is the subject of Tony Tanner's useful, informative, and extremely thoughtful study. A good deal of the book has already appeared in various little magazines, including TriQuarterly and Partisan Review, and though it does suffer from the pretentiousness endemic to such publications (the reader learns of the Dantesque or Platonic allusions in James Purdy, of alt people), City of Words is nevertheless an important inventory of the themes, styles, and obsessions of most of the significant writers now juggling or counter-juggling along the chaotic edge of American consciousness -- practically ""the Whole Sick Crew,"" to quote Pynchon once more. A few don't fit: the realistic portraiture of Malamud and Updike, for instance, jars considerably with the private worlds, sadistic or surrealistic or slapsticky, of Heller, Vonnegut, Barthelme, Kesey, Ellison, Barth, Brautigan, and so on. Moreover, the ""lexical playfields"" of Nabokov and Borges are a curiously cosmopolitan addition: these cultural dandies are far too raisonnable to represent post-modern fragmentation. The best section, brilliantly done, is on the nightmare camera eye of William Burroughs; the gassiest, predictably, that on Norman Mailer. Whether fantasy, either as technique or a new sort of philosophic sensibility (what Tanner calls ""the morality of flexibility""), adequately sums up our times is, of course, doubtful. We may be dazzled by language games, but the visions seem hollow.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION