UDERSTANDING MARY LEE SETTLE
George Garrett
University of South Carolina Press, 1988
187 pp., $19.95
One useful way to distinguish between types of novelists is to characterize them as either intensive or extensive. An intensive novel, much the more common variety in modern times, deals with a small segment of individual experience and consciousness, wringing from it the maximum psychological meaning. Though it may encompass intensive experiences, an extensive novel, more common in earlier times, paints with a broad brush and achieves social and historical complexity.
When a writer does both of these things at a high level, and can even combine them successfully into a seamless whole, then one begins to think in terms of "great" and "enduring." This characterization fits Faulkner, Conrad, Hardy, Dostoyevski, and Solzhenitsyn. And, according to the novelist and poet George Garrett, our relatively unknown contemporary American and Southern writer, Mary Lee Settle, will, in the long view, find a place in this company.
Compared with other writers
Writing of Settle's The Beulah Quintet, which makes up the largest part, but by no means all, of her work, Garrett says, "No other serious American novelist of Settle's generation--that generation which came to literary prominence in the years following World War II--has chosen to attempt anything so large and ambitious.... Settle's remarkable accomplishment stands alone in its time."
Garrett, in the little handbook to Settle's work called Understanding Mary Lee Settle (part of the series "Understanding Contemporary American Literature") displays in detail why he thinks this is so, in terms of both technical literary achievement and social significance. Though this judgment may not have yet found a home in the most fashionable circles of organized literary culture (there were protests from New York when Settle won the National Book Award for Blood Tie in 1978), Garrett does not stand alone. The critic William F. Ryan writes: "Mary Lee Settle may well be determined as the twentieth century American novelist who most splendidly recorded the passion and ideals of our history." Writes Roger Shattuck: "The crucial scenes of the series [The Beulah Quintet] give mythic scope to the classic American pioneer story."
Official modern taste is definitely existential and prefers the intensive to the extensive. It is uncomfortable with fiction that achieves a complexity of social and historical vision. Why this is so is an interesting realm for speculation--perhaps because historical complexity always introduces ambiguity and thus undermines the most fashionable liberal clichés. Just to deal with recent Southern writers, one thinks immediately of the popularity of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, who plow a narrow segment of human experience for all it is worth, with great artistry but without any social or historical breadth, except perhaps inferentially. Among the men, Walker Percy and Reynolds Price fall into the same intensive category. Percy portrays the consciousness and circumstances of the contemporary South perceptively, but nowhere does he achieve much historical depth, at least not without a great deal of exegesis outside of the books
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