ate collections of short but poignant tales of average
despondent Americans waiting for their Godot.
Minimalist Authors and Influences The 1980’s liter-
ary minimalists—sometimes disparaged as “K-mart
realists” or “dirty realists” because of their fascina-
tion with the humdrum, commercial monotony of
everyday lives—wore their populist fascination with
social lowlifes and outcasts with pride. With an un-
compromising grimness of vision redolent of the
muckraking era, and with the repetitious, pared-
down, haunting cadences of Samuel Beckett, mini-
malist writers focused their attention on the mun-
dane lives of characters addicted to alcohol, drugs,
welfare, trailer park blues, or intellectual malaise.
Setting their literary compass on architect Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe’s dictum of “less is more,” they
crafted prose miniatures (though some attempted
to write novels, as well) that baffled with plotless nar-
ration and staggered with concentrated imagery. In
a style stripped of verbal excess, with plots in abey-
ance and moral judgments suspended, Marilynne
Robinson, Ann Beattie, and Richard Ford aired the
kitchen side of America betrayed by the trickle-
down economic miracle that never happened. None
of them, however, was as successful (both in the aes-
thetic and commercial sense) as Raymond Carver,
whose disparate short stories became unified and
exquisitely filmed in 1993 by Robert Altman inShort
Cuts.
In another sense, the minimalism of the 1980’s
was but a contemporary phase in a much older
power struggle between American literature of pro-
fusion and literature of restraint—between the po-
etry of Walt Whitman and that of Emily Dickinson,
or between the prose of Henry James and that of Er-
nest Hemingway. Carver’s writing, as he himself ac-
knowledged, owed in fact to the latter’s “iceberg”
aesthetic, whereby seven-eighths of a narrative may
take place beneath the surface of the textual repre-
sentation. As Hemingway himself noted, the roots of
his success in paring down the narrative lay in what
he termed a “theory of omission.” One can omit or
suppress any part of the narrative as long as this rep-
resentational ellipsis or synecdoche makes readers
feel things they might only vaguely understand.
Hence the essence of the 1980’s literary minimal-
ism: economy with words, focus on surface descrip-
tion, preponderance of noun and verb over adjec-
tive and adverb, unexceptional characters and
mundane situations, and the expectation that read-
ers will take an active role in the shaping of the emo-
tional and moral import of a story, based on oblique
hints and innuendo rather than direct presence of
the author. In their short, open-ended narratives,
American literary minimalists sought to present a
“slice of daily bread and life” during the decade vic-
timized by the fictional Gordon Gekko’s mantra of
“greed is good.”
Impact Although minimalism failed to stem the
tide of self-centered postmodernistic antinarratives,
it revitalized the realistic impulse in American litera-
ture and provided a keen, if depressing, record of
the lowlights of life under Reaganomics.
Further Reading
Baym, Nina, et al., eds.The Norton Anthology of Ameri-
can Literature. New York: Norton, 2007. An invalu-
able resource containing works by most of the em-
inent authors in American history—including the
minimalists.652 Minimalist literature The Eighties in America
Raymond Carver was among the most successful of the literary
minimalists.(© Marion Ettlinger)