The American Century: Literature since 1945 719(The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), A Prayer for
Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus (1994), Until I Find You (2005)) and female
liberationists like Erica Jong (Fear of Flying (1973), Fear of Fifty (1994)) and Lisa
Alther (1944–) (Kinflicks (1976), Original Sin (1981)). At the other edge,
postmodernism as radical, metafictional experiment is more inclined to reveal its
international relations. Experiment is, of course, an American tradition and the
subversion of fictional forms in particular goes back at least as far in American
literature as Herman Melville. But the specific terms in which postmodernists have
interrogated word and thing, language and its connection to reality, show the impact
and sometimes the influence of writers from outside America. Like other cultural
movements, more so than most, postmodernism is on one level an international
phenomenon. And the sense postmodernist writers have of living after realism is one
shared with, say, European poststructuralist critics, writers of le nouveau roman like
Michel Butor and Raymond Queneau, and Latin American magic realists. This
international dimension is foregrounded in the work of those postmodern novelists
whose own story is one of crossings between national boundaries, especially the
European and American. The fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia, spending
long years in Europe before continuing his exile in America, is a case in point. So are
the narrative experiments of the French-American Raymond Federman (1928–2009),
whose Take It Or Leave It (1976) announces itself as “an exaggerated second hand tale
to be read aloud either standing or sitting,” and the books of the Polish-born, Russian-
reared Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991) from The Painted Bird (1965), through Being There
(1971) and Blind Date (1977), to his last novel, The Hermit of 69th Street (1988).
Another instance of international origins promoting international connections is
the writing of Walter Abish (1931–). Abish was born in Austria and reared in China
before taking US citizenship. His first novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), invites a
comparison with le nouveau roman in its stern attention to verbal structure. Every
word of the first chapter begins with the letter A, the second with A or B, the third
with A, B, or C, and so on. At Z, the process reverses, the final chapter beginning
every word again with the letter A. Abish’s second novel, How German It Is (1984),
suggests other international relations. A postmodern political thriller, it concerns an
American of German parentage who returns to a German town to investigate his
father’s wartime death and to answer his own question as to how German he is. The
international influential presences here are several. They include American writers
like Pynchon and French ones like Butor, who have used popular genres to break
and undercut them. More deeply, persuasively, though, they are other, European
writers such as Italo Calvino and Peter Handke. As in the work of Calvino and
Handke, there is a bleak detachment, a flat materialism to How German It Is, the
presentation of a world of signs without meanings under which dark meanings may
hide. A writer like Abish, as he explores the crisis relations between history and form
and pursues the task of unlocking some hidden code that might interpret those
relations, shows how postmodernism – like any other movement in American
literature, at some point – has to be perceived within a frame of reference other than
the American. It has to be, not only because postmodernist writers skip acrossGGray_c05.indd 719ray_c 05 .indd 719 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM