[Review of :] Contemporary American Fiction / by Nick Hornby. - London: Vision Press ; New York : St Martin's Press, 1992

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[Review of :] Contemporary American Fiction / by Nick Hornby. - London: Vision Press ; New York : St Martin's Press, 1992

MADSEN, Deborah Lea

MADSEN, Deborah Lea. [Review of :] Contemporary American Fiction / by Nick Hornby. -

London: Vision Press ; New York : St Martin's Press, 1992.

, 1994, vol. 89, no. 4, p. 991-992

DOI : 10.2307/3733929

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:93658

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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Modern Language Review, 89. 4 (1994), pp. 991-992.

Contemporary American Fiction. By NICK HORNBY. London: Vision Press; New York: St Martin's Press.

1992. 168pp. £17.95.

The title of Nick Hornby's book leads one to place it with other recent surveys of the field of contemporary American literature, such as the essay collection edited by Graham Clarke,The New American Writing:

Essays on American Literature Since 1970 (New York: St Martin's Press; London: Vision Press, 1990). But Contemporary American Fiction in fact does not attempt a comprehensive overview of the current fiction scene in the United States. This book deals with a highly circumscribed group of writers and texts: the so- called 'dirty realists', named for the twoGranta collectionsDirty Realism andMore Dirt, which brought to prominence such writers as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Ann Phillips, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff (though to describe the book thus is, perhaps, to suggest a greater degree of coherence than it does indeed possess). Interspersed with essays dealing with the 'dirty realists' are essays concerned with Ann Tyler, Andre Dubus, and, in the opening piece, Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Tallent, Tama Janowitz, and Lorrie Moore.

The first essay sets out to characterize the genre of the 'New Yorker short story' by analysing the distinctive qualities of Ann Beattie's fiction, in order to establish the basis for what will be a contrast with the Granta writers sustained throughout the book. It should be made clear that this kind of analysis is Hornby's principal interest. He makes not even a gesture towards theorizing these contemporary writers; instead, he is concerned to introduce us to them by making familiar those narrative qualities that might otherwise alienate a British reader. And he is quite explicit about the intended readership of this book; he addresses himself to a British reader, unfamiliar with the reality of contemporary America, who needs a basic introduction to the aesthetic and cultural terms within which recent fiction writers are working. This book takes an old- fashioned formalist line, setting down in some detail, and with reference to the conditions of the writer's life, what it is that makes each of the chosen authors interesting and worth reading. This is a worthy critical project, but it is dull; and the essays generally are a dull accumulation of plot summaries spiced with catalogue descriptions of narrative or fictional characteristics. Because they deal closely with the work of individual writers, one writer per chapter, the book is much more a gathering of discrete pieces than the presentation of any sustained argument or critical position.

The map of contemporary American fiction that does emerge from Hornby's explorations is one sharply divided between writers of theNew Yorker school, exemplified here by Ann Beattie, and those who are brought together under the banner of theGranta collections. The salient difference between these kinds of fiction, according to Hornby, emerges from his discussion of Beattie's story 'In the White Night'. He writes:

There is a sense in which the absence of pain directly expressed is the whole point of the story, but it is difficult to imagine many of the writers in theGranta collection settling for the delicacy – of language, of theme, even – that characterizes Beattie's work. Conversely, Beattie's characters – comfortably middle-class, invariably suburban – would find very little in common with the alienated narrators of Ford's Rock Springs or Wolff's 'The Barracks Thief'. (p.10) The 'delicacy' of Beattie's style places her within theNew Yorker mainstream; the 'low life veracity', the 'authenticity', of theGranta group is what lends to these writers their interest and power. Yet the kind of narrative realism practised by Carver and others remains elusive in Hornby's account. It is almost as though the literary credentials of these writers were identical with their working-class status, which is represented through their regional and blue-collar fictional subjects. Hornby is making a case for current trends in American short-story writing, but the subtext of his argument requires one to ask where, in terms of this vision of middle-class mainstream and working-classavant garde, one would locate the writers of the contemporary 'ethnic Renaissance' or, indeed, those metafictionists who have dominated American fiction for the past thirty years. A clearer title, together with a precise introduction (the book lacks any sort of preface), would enhance the readability of this study enormously by setting out just what is its purpose and what are its author's aims and assumptions. As it is, whileContemporary American Fiction may offer the novice an accessible introduction to one aspect of the current fiction scene in the United States, it has little to recommend it to the more informed reader.

Deborah L. Madsen University of Leicester