The American Century: Literature since 1945 717already mentioned and Sukenick himself (Up (1968), 98.6 (1975), Blown Away
(1986)), as Nicholson Baker (1940–) (The Mezzanine (1988), Vo x (1992), The
Everlasting Story of Wory (1998)), William H. Gass (1924–) (Omensetter’s Luck
(1966)), Steve Katz (1935–) (The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (1968), Moving Parts
(1977)), Clarence Major (1936–) (All-Night Visions (1969), No (1973)), Stephen
Schneck (1944–1996) (The Nightclerk (1965)), Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)
(Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things (1971), Flawless Play Restored (1975),
Aberration of Starlight (1980)), and Rudolph Wurlitzer (1938–) (Nog (1969)). For
that matter, it can incorporate Joseph McElroy (1930–), whose Lookout Cartridge
(1974) conveys a sense of formal systems functioning in a void and one of whose
novels, Plus (1977), is about a mind suspended in space. And Robert Coover, who in
his finest novel, The Public Burning (1977), transfers actual events, including the
Eisenhower years and the execution of the Rosenbergs for spying, to the figurative
realm. The execution of the Rosenbergs is turned into a public burning in Times
Square, New York. Times Square itself is presented not just as a public meeting place
but a source of a history, since it is here the records of the New York Times are
created. Coover goes on to analyze how historical record is made, in a bold
imaginative gesture which shows that fiction does not only aid fact in the rehearsal
of the past; it can, and does, draw it into subjective reality. In doing so, he offers
what is in effect a postmodernist meditation on history, and on the urgencies, the
origins of story.
Two other writers often associated with postmodernism, Russell Banks (1940–)
and David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), have taken very different paths. Banks’s
output is unusually varied. His first novel, Family Life (1975), is a fragmented
narrative set in an imaginary kingdom. With its rejection of traditional forms of
characterization and its foregrounding of artifice, it bears many of the hallmarks of
postmodernism. So do his second and fourth novels, Hamilton Starks (1978) and
The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983). With The Book of Jamaica (1980), however,
and, even more, Continental Drift (1985), Banks gravitated toward realism while still
using metafictional techniques. Continental Drift, perhaps his finest novel so far,
combines two at first sight unrelated stories – about a Haitian woman’s attempt to
escape to America and an American man’s relocation of his family to Florida – to
explore class conflict and transnational migration. The shift toward realism has
become even more marked in Banks’s later novels; and so has his preoccupation
with forms of violence ranging from the personal to the global. Affliction (1989), for
instance, is an autobiographically based novel about family abuse; The Sweet
Hereafter (1991) offers several perspectives on a fatal school-bus accident;
Cloudsplitter (1998) tells the story of the radical abolitionist John Brown from the
standpoint of his son; while The Darling (2006) is an account by an ex-member of a
radical activist group, on the run from the law, of her encounter with a crisis-torn
Liberia. What binds these different fictional experiments together is Banks’s concern
with multiple varieties of abuse. As he has put it, “I see my life as a kind of obsessive
return to the ‘wound’ of abuse,... going back again and again ... trying to figure
out ... who is to blame and who is to be forgiven.”GGray_c05.indd 717ray_c 05 .indd 717 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM