City of Words [antikvár]

Prefatory Note This book is a study of some of the novels written in America between 1950 and 1970. Indirectly I hope it manages to say something about the novel as a form and America as a country as well. I should stress from the outset that my primary aim is to try to understand the American imagination as it has expressed itself in fictional forms during this period. I think such efforts of understanding addressed to contemporary literature can be helpful, and that they are quite as much a part of the critic's task as the revivification of the literature of the past. A close study of the literature of the present can help us to arrive at a clearer perception of some of the plights and privileges of our own inescapable modernity. As John Cage says — 'Here we are now.' The last two decades have seen important changes and developments in American life and literature, and I felt that there was more than usual justification for a detailed consideration of a large number of works. On a more personal level, this book represents a long meditation on what America and its literature have meant to me since I first went there in 1958 and contracted an incurable interest in, and affection for, both. I would like this book to stand as a tribute, offered with admiration and gratitude, to the many good people, places and books I have encountered there. Although I have tried to cover most of the more interesting novelists of the past two decades, there are inevitably some omissions. I have not, for instance, considered the work of William Styron, James Jones, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, J. F. Powers, Thomas Berger, Terry Southern, Richard Stern, Paul Bowles or Jean Stafford to name only a few. I regret that I did not have the space to consider some of the more recent writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Newman, Robert Coover, Irvin Faust, Leonard Michaels, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Ishmael Reed, Alison Lurie and Gil Orlovitz. But the book is already long and I must leave my principle of selection to justify itself, or fail to, as the case may be. With any book of this kind there is the difficulty of deciding whether to assume that the reader has read the novel under discussion or needs to be told the story. I have tried to write each chapter in such a way that it will contain enough material to enable someone with no previous knowledge of the writer concerned to read it and understand what the novels are about. On the other hand I have tried II