The American Century: Literature since 1945 597she calls in one of her books “the circle of my consciousness.” Her writings, fictional
and nonfictional, could in fact be described in the terms she herself used for the
work of Samuel Beckett: as “delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness – pared
down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized.” In this, she
is not alone. A number of other recent women writers have been concerned with
the predicament of the trapped sensibility, often female. The problem is there in
such otherwise different books as Final Payments (1978) by Mary Gordon (1949–)
and the immensely popular novels The Women’s Room (1977) by Marilyn French
(1929–2009) and Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong (1942–). More seriously and
powerfully, it is present in the work of Joan Didion (1934–). Didion is an enormously
accomplished writer of nonfiction that explores American dreams and, more often,
American nightmares: that recent history of ecstasy and violence that Mailer spoke
of, and that has led so often to political disaster or cultural breakdown (Slouching
Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), After Henry (1992)). And in
novels like Play It As It Lays (1970) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), she has
taken alienation to a kind of logical conclusion. In spare, lyrical prose that works as
much through its absences, the spaces between the words as the words themselves,
she presents the reader with a world of vacancy, where the protagonists find it
difficult, if not impossible, to escape from emotional numbness, other characters
approximate to objects, things to be manipulated, and experience is casually random,
violent, and without meaning. As the protagonist of Play It As It Lays, Maria Wyeth,
watches an unknown woman walk across a supermarket parking lot in the “vacant
sunlight” of California, she feels that she is “watching the dead still center of the
world, the quintessential intersection of nothing:” a heart of emptiness, a void,
rather than a heart of darkness. The fragmented structure, as well as the laconic
style, of Didion’s stories catches that emptiness, and the lives of drift and insignificance
characters like Maria lead. Which is a comment, clearly, on the vacancy, the blandness
of American culture – and a society that, for Didion, resembles “an inchoate army
on the move” – and a barbed aside on the condition of women in particular.
“It occurred to Maria,” we are told, “that whatever arrangements were made, they
worked less well for women.”
For some characters in recent novels by women, the way to escape from these
conditions is to go way out west: not to the coast, necessarily, but to the wide open
spaces that lie between that coast and the Mississippi River. So, the protagonist in
The Bean Trees (1989), then later Pigs in Heaven (1993), by Barbara Kingsolver
(1955–) flees westward to Arizona, from the poverty and pressures of her life in
Kentucky. There, she builds a new life for herself and a new kind of “home” and
“family” with friends and the abandoned child she takes up with her on the journey.
And, in Heading West (1981) by Doris Betts (1932–), the main character is taken
from a life in the East that she feels “could be summarized in two words: Unsatisfactory
Conditions” to a more real, more elemental existence, also in Arizona. “I’ve been
sensible all my life,” she reflects; now she surrenders to the authenticity of rocks and
rivers, the superiority of archaeology to history. What, however, is remarkable about
the fiction of Jane Smiley (1949–) Marilyn Robinson (1943–), and E. Annie ProulxGGray_c05.indd 597ray_c 05 .indd 597 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM