The American Century: Literature since 1945 573stronger in the work of Peter De Vries (1910–1993), many of whose works, like
The Mackerel Plaza (1958), expose the superficiality of the American suburbs.
Richard Condon (1915–1996) is more coolly clinical in his analysis of Cold War
paranoia (The Manchurian Candidate (1960)), the technique of mass murder
(An Infinity of Mirrors (1966)), the greed of American big business (Mile High
(1969)), the corruptions of American politics (The Vertical Smile (1971)), and the
arrogance of American empire (The Star-Spangled Crunch (1974)). Nelson Algren
(1908–1981) and William Gaddis (1922–1998) offer another severe contrast, a
further illustration of the different formal possibilities for rewriting contemporary
America. In novels like The Man With the Golden Arm (1948) and A Walk on the Wild
Side (1956), Algren uses a hardbitten prose style to narrate the lives of an American
underclass, a world of dealers and dope, poker and prostitution. Gaddis, on the
other hand, employs a richly parodic, protean narrative idiom that insists on its own
fictiveness, to play with such themes as art and illusion (The Recognitions (1955)),
the hypocrisies of corporate empire (J R (1975)), ambition, loss, and the hunger for
apocalypse in a world of competition (Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)), and the complex
figurations that make up the maze of American law (A Frolic of His Own (1994)).
A contrast of a different kind is offered by Paul Bowles (1910–1999) and William
Styron (1925–2006). Bowles became an expatriate in the 1940s, and his work was
generally set in Morocco where he lived most of his life. The Sheltering Sky (1949),
for instance, Let it Come Down (1952), and The Spider’s House (1955) are all set in
North Africa. Their nominal scene, however, is less important than the interior
world of his characters, which is a world of nothingness. Many of them are rich
American exiles and most of them have reached – to use the phrase that concludes
The Sheltering Sky – “the end of the line.” In his own cosmopolitan way, as he exposed
the horror of nothing, Bowles exploited one vein of writing often associated with the
South. Styron, who spent most of his life in the United States – first in Virginia, then
in Connecticut – exploited other veins. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951),
revealing the tragic life and suicide of a girl whose rich Southern family was unable
to supply either her or themselves with love and security, is almost an exercise in
Faulknerian tropes and themes. While his fourth, The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), concerning the life of the eponymous hero, the leader of an 1831 slave revolt,
is a radical rewriting of plantation romance. It is also, as Styron explains in an
author’s note, “a meditation on history.” So, for that matter, are his 1953 novella,
The Long March (1957) and his 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice, which deals with the
historical event that has cast its shadow over all subsequent Western history,
the Holocaust. If Styron, despite his imaginative adventuring into other parts of the
world, seems peculiarly Southern in his preoccupation with guilt, the indelible
nature of evil, then others roughly contemporary with him seem notably Western or
Midwestern: among them, William Eastlake (1917–1997) and William Gass (1924–).
Eastlake made the West, especially New Mexico, his fictional terrain in stories about
fraternal rivalry (Go in Beauty (1956)) and friendship between a white man and a
Navajo (Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963). Gass imaginatively
settled in the Midwest. Omensetter’s Luck (1966) is a densely written story of aGGray_c05.indd 573ray_c 05 .indd 573 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM