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"Attentive and Original Without Being Show-Offy"

From: Christopher Caldwell
To: A.O. ScottPosted Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 2:08 PM ET

Welcome to a new twist in an ongoing Slate experiment. For a few years now, we've been doing our book reviews as epistolary correspondences between two critics—usually big shots in whatever field the book is about. Now Slate is switching to a cast of 12 reviewers, chosen not for their expertise in any one area but because they're curious, sensible, and witty general readers whose criteria for evaluating a book are probably a lot like yours. Each week, you'll hear two of the folks below discussing a new book or group of books. The other Clubbers may interrupt them with comments and questions. And we hope you will, too, by submitting postings to "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum.

Participants include:

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author An American Story. Her next book, The End of Blackness, will be published in October 2003.

James Fallows, the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

Jodi Kantor, the New York editor of Slate.

Sarah Lyall, a correspondent in the London bureau of the New York Times.

Nell Minow, the editor of the Corporate Library, which covers corporate governance and performance, and writer of Movie Mom, reviews of films and videos.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.

Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Erik Tarloff, the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book. (Click here to buy Face-Time and here to buy The Man Who Wrote the Book.)

Ted Widmer, the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City and the co-author of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Marjorie Williams, the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Who are these people?

Dear Tony,

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The last four of this book's five chapters come from Volume 7 of The Cambridge History of American Literature, 1940-1990. So what we have on our hands here is something resembling the "Selected Encyclopedia Entries of Morris Dickstein." Some repetition results. That is about the worst thing I can find to say about this sharp piece of literary (and ultimately cultural) criticism. Its readings are attentive and original without being show-offy. Dickstein is almost allergic to the literary, cultural, sociological, and historical clichés that are the hallmark of other critics' writing about the period he's covering.

But what period is he covering? Dickstein makes us rethink the concept of the "postwar" in two ways. First, he says that World War II was an epochal break for the United States, much as World War I was for Europe. A continuing "aspiration to European complexity," as Robert Hughes put it, led Americans to share the idea of WWI as a watershed and miss the one they were actually living through. Sixteen million Americans served in World War II. "To many," Dickstein writes, "the hierarchy and discipline of military life cut against the American grain." We can go further than that and say it rendered impossible the individualistic culture that was the hallmark of American exceptionalism—and the mark of American literature up to that point. A lot of fiction Dickstein deals with is an attempt to get that sense of individuality back.

The second important "reperiodizing" (forgive me, Tony) is Dickstein's rejection of the hackneyed distinction between a staid, unimaginative 1950s and a liberated creative period that starts in the 1960s. "Where once I had thought of the 1950s and 1960s as cultural contraries," he writes, "it became clear that there were vital elements that bound together the whole period from 1945 to 1970." Right on, as those of us born during the period used to say. The difference between 1950s culture and 1960s culture—although it served the purposes of self-styled rebels to accentuate it—is not a decisive one. I would argue that 1946 has more in common with 1964 than with 1942.

The subject of fiction after the war is both impossibly large and impossibly wrapped up with other things. Dickstein has made his subject manageable through a triage. "We can scarcely understand postwar fiction," he writes, "without seeing how few writers from the pre-war years actually survived the war itself." That's not exactly true—it means largely ignoring Steinbeck, Algren, O'Hara, Cozzens, and others who did continue writing—but the fact that Dickstein believes it makes his book more readable. It allows him to focus on his real subject, which is the writers who inhabited the society (and the consciousness) World War II wrought.

To further avoid muddying the waters, Dickstein won't touch middlebrow fiction with a barge pole, aside from a couple of brief feints at John Horne Burnes, Grace Metalious, and Cameron Hawley. (Pulp fiction is a different matter.) Where is Lloyd C. Douglas' The Robe? Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy? Cozzens' By Love Possessed? When he seeks to show what others were doing in the world of art, Dickstein focuses not on lesser fiction writers but on film noir, bebop, and Action Painting.

There is scarcely an idée reçue in the whole of this book. One of the most consistently entertaining things in this book is the author's opinions. Dickstein is not a big rater-and-ranker, but as best I can tell, he considers the giant novel of the postwar years to be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (a "veritable Ulysses of the black experience," which Dickstein later compares to Candide and Emerson). The major figures are Ellison and Bellow—with Updike and Roth granted a strong claim to the first rank. He makes a case for the centrality of James Jones, Chester Himes, John Barth, Richard Yates, and Tennessee Williams.

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Other writers suffer. Dickstein admires the ingenuity of Catch-22 but finds it a "static book"; he gushes over Lolita but finds Nabokov's literariness "oppressive" for the most part. Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin he considers better essayists than novelists. It is Vidal and Mailer whose stock falls most sharply. Vidal stands accused of a "basic timidity … a safe kind of daring." His historical novels are "well-researched but thinly imagined." His prose style is "the most readable and least original" of the four postwar gay writers Dickstein profiles. Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, meanwhile, is overrated and considerably less original than it looks, more a holdover from 1930s Popular Front fiction than a new direction in fiction. Mailer's essay "The White Negro" "makes painful reading today." So much of what Dickstein quotes invites us to see Mailer as a buffoon, particularly Mailer's exaltation of his generation in Advertisements for Myself ("We had to write our way out into the unspoken territories of sex—there was so much there, it was new, and the life of our talent depended upon going into the borderland.")

Criticism is in general a genre badly suited to book length. Inevitably, this book is stronger in some parts than in others. Dickstein's reading of Updike (as a road novelist à l'intérieur) strikes me as particularly ingenious and original, his rating of Cheever seems insufficiently positive (it's very positive, but I expect Chekhov/Maupassant invocations here), and his patience with John Barth is too long. I also think he takes a wrong turn in discussing what it is that made blacks and Jews so prominent among postwar writers. But anytime anyone writes a book of criticism that holds my interest—and Dickstein has done it several times now—I'm left grateful and even wowed.

Best,
Chris

the book club:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6

"Attentive and Original Without Being Show-Offy"

From: Christopher Caldwell
To: A.O. ScottPosted Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 2:08 PM ET

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Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. A.O. Scott is a film critic at the New York Times.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

These writers represent the last American generation to grow up in a common world; whether big city ethnic neighborhood or Eastern Shore small town, their childhoods were lived in human scale communities which for the most part shared a world of meaning. At the same time, for the most part, they also came of age in the new post-war America in which factors as diverse as the GI Bill, mass media and the growth of suburbia obliterated the social ground of these communities. Caldwell is right that the "alienation" of these authors is much more ambiguous than any simple 50s rebel-conformist dichotomy imagines.

--Mitch

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

I grew up on some (not all) of writers discussed in these essays. In my inexperience, I thought they were the last word in social and cultural criticism. When, some years later, I got around to reading Sinclair Lewis, I suffered the shock of realizing that he had written considerably more trenchant criticism, as well as generally better novels, in the 1920's. (I refer only to his major works, not the many mediocre ones which followed his Nobel Prize.) Many of the same themes are there--the dislocations occasioned by ethnic cultures yielding to national culture, the suspicion and cynicism of economically and culturally marginalized groups confronting bastions of privilege, consensus and conformity pretending to be moral superiority, the alienation of bold and creative individuals. In addition, Lewis conducted focused dissections of distinct social institutions--religion, medicine, business, small towns--in a way which no postwar novelist I can think of did (maybe Updike, in the Rabbit books). Perhaps because of this, Lewis has been less highly regarded, since he tends to be classed as a muckraker, or even worse, a didactic writer. That is not my evaluation. I find him, at his best, at least as skilled an expositor as any other of the frequently bitter relationship of individual and society in America.

--Yukon

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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