25 April 2008
The Flowering of the Individual, Part II
Marginalized voices -- from African Americans to feminists -- proclaim their stories
(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, USA Literature in Brief.)
JOHN UPDIKE (1932- )
John Updike, like Cheever, is also regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man – Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom – through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) – spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s – finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from the banal. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become a prosperous businessman during the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final novel, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, before his death from a heart attack, against the backdrop of the 1980s.
Updike possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness.
NORMAN MAILER (1923- )
Norman Mailer made himself the most visible novelist of the l960s and l970s. Co-founder of the anti-establishment New York City weekly The Village Voice, Mailer publicized himself along with his political views. In his appetite for experience, vigorous style, and a dramatic public persona, Mailer follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway. To gain a vantage point on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vietnam War protests, black liberation, and the women's movement, he constructed hip, existentialist, macho male personae (in her book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett identified Mailer as an archetypal male chauvinist). The irrepressible Mailer went on to marry six times and run for mayor of New York.
From such New Journalism exercises as Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), an analysis of the 1968 U.S. presidential conventions, and his compelling study about the execution of a condemned murderer, The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer turned to writing such ambitious, if flawed, novels as Ancient Evenings (1983), set in the Egypt of antiquity, and Harlot's Ghost (1991), revolving around the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
TONI MORRISON (1931- )
African-American novelist Toni Morrison was born in Ohio to a spiritually oriented family. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and has worked as a senior editor in a major Washington publishing house and as a distinguished professor at various universities.
Morrison's richly woven fiction has gained her international acclaim. In compelling, large-spirited novels, she treats the complex identities of black people in a universal manner. In her early work The Bluest Eye (1970), a strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who is driven mad by an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have magically become blue and that they will make her lovable. Morrison has said that she was creating her own sense of identity as a writer through this novel: "I was Pecola, Claudia, everybody."
Sula (1973) describes the strong friendship of two women. Morrison paints African-American women as unique, fully individual characters rather than as stereotypes. Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) has won several awards. It follows a black man, Milkman Dead, and his complex relations with his family and community. Beloved (1987) is the wrenching story of a woman who murders her children rather than allow them to live as slaves. It employs the dreamlike techniques of magical realism in depicting a mysterious figure, Beloved, who returns to live with the mother who has slit her throat. Jazz (1992), set in 1920s Harlem, is a story of love and murder. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
As the 20th century ended and the 21st century began, mass social and geographic mobility, the Internet, immigration, and globalization only emphasized the subjective voice in a context of cultural fragmentation. Some contemporary writers reflect a drift towards quieter, more accessible voices. For many prose writers, the region, rather than the nation, provides the defining geography.
LOUISE GLÜCK (1943- )
One of the most impressive contemporary poets is Louise Glück. Born in New York City, Glück, the U.S. poet laureate for 2003-2004, grew up with an abiding sense of guilt due to the death of a sister born before her. At Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, she studied with poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. Much of her poetry deals with tragic loss. Each of Glück's books attempts new techniques, making it difficult to summarize her work. In Glück's memorable The Wild Iris (1992), different kinds of flowers utter short metaphysical monologues. The book's title poem, an exploration of resurrection, could be an epigraph for Glück's work as a whole. The wild iris, a gorgeous deep blue flower growing from a bulb that lies dormant all winter, says: "It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth."
From the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
BILLY COLLINS (1941- )
The poetry of Billy Collins is refreshing and exhilarating. Collins uses everyday language to record the myriad details of everyday life, freely mixing quotidian events (eating, doing chores, writing) with cultural references. His humor and originality have brought him a wide audience. Though some have faulted Collins for being too accessible, his unpredictable flights of fancy open out into mystery.
Collins's is a domesticated form of surrealism. His best poems quickly propel the imagination up a stairway of increasingly surrealistic situations, at the end offering an emotional landing, a mood one can rest on. The short poem "The Dead," from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), gives some sense of Collins's fanciful flight and gentle settling down, as if a bird had come to rest.
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
ANNIE PROULX (1935- )
The striking stylist Annie Proulx crafts stories of struggling northern New Englanders in Heart Songs (1988). Her best novel, The Shipping News (1993), is set even further north, in Newfoundland, Canada. Proulx has also spent years in the West, and one of her short stories inspired the 2006 movie “Brokeback Mountain.”
RICHARD FORD (1944- )
Mississippi-born Richard Ford began writing in a Faulknerian vein, but is best known for his subtle novel set in New Jersey, The Sportswriter (1986), and its sequel, Independence Day (l995). The latter is about Frank Bascombe, a dreamy, evasive drifter who loses all the things that give his life meaning – a son, his dream of writing fiction, his marriage, lovers and friends, and his job. Bascombe is sensitive and intelligent – his choices, he says, are made "to deflect the pain of terrible regret" – and his emptiness, along with the anonymous malls and bald new housing developments that he endlessly cruises through, mutely testify to Ford's vision of a national malaise.
AMY TAN (1952- )
Northern California houses a rich tradition of Asian-American writing, whose characteristic themes include family and gender roles, the conflict between generations, and the search for identity. One Asian-American writer from California is novelist Amy Tan, whose best-selling The Joy Luck Club became a hit film in 1993. Its interlinked story-like chapters delineate the different fates of four mother-and-daughter pairs. Tan's novels spanning historical China and today's United States include The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), about half-sisters, and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), about a daughter's care for her mother.
SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966- )
A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Sherman Alexie is the youngest Native-American novelist to achieve national fame. Alexie gives unsentimental and humorous accounts of Indian life with an eye for incongruous mixtures of tradition and pop culture. His story cycles include Reservation Blues (1995) and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), which inspired the effective film of reservation life Smoke Signals (1998), for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. Alexie's recent story collection is The Toughest Indian in the World (2000).
[Kathryn VanSpanckeren, professor of English at the University of Tampa, has lectured in American literature widely abroad, and is former director of the Fulbright-sponsored Summer Institute in American Literature for international scholars. Her publications include poetry and scholarship. She received her Bachelors degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.]
