THE AMERICAN NOVEL AND THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
John W. Aldridge
New York: Oxford University Press, 1983
166 pp., $16.95
PANIC AMONG THE PHILISTINES
Bryan F. Griffin
St. Louis: Regnery Gateway, 1983
259 pp., $12.95
Writers are supposed to be motivated by alienation, by the urge to instruct, or by some combination of the two. Sometime after World War II they gave up both and undertook the mass production of plotless, formless, vacuous garbage which the votaries of The Media proclaimed as high art. Writers thus made famous, found it easier to be celebrities than to be good writers. So conclude Griffin and Aldridge in their respective examinations of the sorry state of American literature.
I think it was Richard Armour who wrote that the United States had no need or use for the Virgin Islands when they came upon the market, but that there was something about the name which made Congress cast caution to the winds. A similar flight of whimsy must have seized the editors at Regnery, a normally sound publishing house, when Panic Among the Philistines came over the transom.
Panic originally appeared several years ago as a two-part essay in Harper's. In the Harper's essays, an angry, Goetz-like Griffin stalked the Republican Letters and blasted away at the menacing thugs who had turned American literature into a combat zone. Griffin heralded the reawakening of a public long gulled by the posturing of writers well known for being well known, and middle-aged men like Norman Mailer, obsessed by sex, profanity, and nihilist plot lines. Now the people, realizing Pauline Kael and her counterparts in book reviews were pied pipers, were demanding Real Art, and the leaders of postwar culture were terrified: "Old facades were suddenly crumbling, older masks were finally rotting, and everywhere there was the unspoken fear that the game might soon be up".
Amusing stuff, tellingly told, and well enough left alone, as an essay. But no… presumably on the theory that if some is good a lot more is still better, Griffin has traded his revolver for a B-52, blatting his essay into a violent, splenetic screed which leaves only smoking ruins behind. Griffin's book is an enormous catalogue of malefactors whose work he does not like. It is a long and comprehensive list, from E.L. Doctorow, "a popular writer of rather smutty political novels", to "literary sexologist Gay Talese" and "schlock novelist John (Garp) Irving", and on to the "clever young writer of explicitly erotic novels named Scott Spencer", John Barth, John Cheever, Christopher Isherwood, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Don DeLillo, Jerzy Kosinski, Truman Capote, a clutch of critics, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and New York Review of Books tote bags, after which demolition, Griffin ostensibly vindicates good taste in a cautionary peroration as slushy as the worst self-congratulatory excesses he quotes from his targets.
The revitalization of American fiction is a worthy ideal, if you assume it needs it. Taking Griffin's claims at face value, one still finds his argument undermining itself. He goes on too long and
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