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The Alienationists
by John Palattella
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” These words appeared in 1991, and they were uttered by Bill Gray, a character in Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Gray is a novelist, and DeLillo is using him to meditate on his occupational hazards—namely, that the novel is no longer provocative because it is no longer capable of infiltrating or even smudging a reader’s consciousness. DeLillo’s lament is a paranoid version of a claim made by Philip Roth in 1961 in “Writing American Fiction”: The reality of American life has become more vivid and outsized—in other words, more fictional—than any recent American fiction about it.
Among those writers who appear to accept the Roth/DeLillo diagnosis, one response has been to cultivate style as an antidote to an unreal environment. All novelists, of course, cultivate a style, but those who covet style above all else are sleight-of-hand artists, writers eager to warp the line between fact and fiction and make language the star of their stories. In Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (1971), Raymond Federman, a NYFA fiction fellow, uses puns, parodies, and typographic swells to tell the story of a French Jewish boy who travels to the United States after his family has been murdered in a concentration camp during World War II.
More recently, in The Age of Wire and String (1996) and Notable American Women (2002), Ben Marcus has created very peculiar fictional universes. The novels read like encyclopedic or scientific texts written by the ghost of Samuel Beckett, with inventive phrases ricocheting inside chilly bureaucratic babble and techno-speak. In Marcus’s fiction, the ominous is often deflated, if not pulverized, by linguistic experimentation.
There are, of course, other ways out of the quandary described by Roth and DeLillo. One is the path taken by DeLillo himself in Underworld (1997): To write a story that is neither hostage to history nor contemptuous of it, and to stock that story with details and invent from them a shattered, sprawling epic of contemporary American life. DeLillo’s 800-page novel (as maximalist as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House) shuttles back and forth through many countries and all the decades of the second half of the twentieth century. It presents the modern state as not only the enemy of novelists but an enemy novelist itself, since for DeLillo it was the state’s discovery of the atom bomb and the value of terror as the ultimate deterrent that suffused daily life with paranoia and depleted the novelist’s power.
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