In the Cut. - book reviews

National Review, June 17, 1996 by James Gardner

THIRTY years ago the art of fiction began to undergo a change similar to one that had already befallen the theatrical arts. Though theater had once been the best loved form of mass entertainment, it yielded that title to film and then turned inward, catering to an elite taste that saw theater as art rather than diversion. As a result, these two factors, which had formerly been united, increasingly went their separate ways. Fiction also used to fulfill the Horatian injunction to delight as well as to edify. But in recent years it too has split, not into different media, as theater and film have done, but into different forms of fiction. On the one hand Stephen King and Jackie Collins are widely read for their entertainment value. On the other, novelists like Thomas Pynchon and William Gass intentionally and provocatively suppress the element of pleasure, as if it were incompatible with serious fiction.

The logical consequence of this latter trend, and easily the most hyped novel of the decade, is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a thousand densely printed pages of plotless abstrusity punctuated by a series of brainless pratfalls. These are followed by a hundred more pages of notes which manage to be semi-literate in four languages and whose purpose, to this critic at least, is entirely inscrutable. There have been rumors that Little, Brown, the publisher, actually pressed Mr. Wallace to make the book even longer than he had intended, in order to increase its ''stunt'' value. As it is, everyone is talking about the book and no one so far has actually read it.

Fortunately, most contemporary fiction of the artistic kind is somewhat more rewarding. Often its vanguardism consists less in the sorts of formal difficulty that were characteristic of Gass and Pynchon than in the freshness of the authors' identities. Amy Tan, for example, writes about being a Chinese-American woman, Bharati Mukherjee about being an Indian woman in Iowa, Dale Peck about being homosexual, and Ernest J. Gaines about being black. Such literature falls within the modern liberal tradition of embracing difference and being open to other experiences. But both of these undertakings imply a core of shared values, so that, even as this literature asserts the difference between author and reader, it usually has the reassuring subtext of a common humanity that unites us all.

Despite the primacy of this kind of ''nice'' literature, there is another kind of literature that increasingly exhibits, and sometimes even advocates, very different values. Such fiction is often termed ''transgressive,'' and there are correlative developments in film and the visual arts. Like the humanistic literature of Amy Tan, it is seen as being somehow liberal or leftist because it seeks the distinction of radical ''otherness'' and because it aspires to threaten the status quo that writers like Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee seek only to correct. The two strains converge from different angles of assault on a center allegedly dominated by a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, right-handed patriarchy.

The roots of transgressive literature, of literature that violently attacks the center of a culture, are ancient, reaching all the way from Euripides's Bacchae, through Marlowe and Webster and the Marquis de Sade, to Huysmans and Celine. This literature of self-defined immorality, anguish, and degradation is constantly waxing and waning in our culture, as, for its part, is the humanistic strain. Thus the ages of Fielding, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, and Saul Bellow were in a general way humanistic, whereas those of Byron and Wilde and the Surrealists tended in the other direction. At the present time -- and this is perhaps a unique occurrence --the two strains exist side by side, as different faces of the same coin. Four recent and critically celebrated novels -- Susanna Moore's In the Cut, A. M. Holmes's The End of Alice, Dennis Cooper's Try, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho -- exemplify this development, each from a different angle.

What unites all these novels, aside from their almost unimaginable gruesomeness, is the peculiar relation in which they stand to the straitlaced center of society. Reading In the Cut, a polished performance with a gripping plot and some humor, we immediately recognize the protagonist as ''one of us,'' that is, a liberally inclined citizen of the center. This slightly dowdy but attractive English teacher is well-intentioned in a schoolmarmish sort of way, eager to bring literature to the inner city. Though she is, to all appearances, the sort of person who would read the novels of Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee, each of the subordinate characters she encounters is at variance with her. They do not read quality fiction. They do not sip white wine and herbal teas. They are either working class or underclass. Cornelius, whom she is struggling to teach English, is a black high-school student whose hidden literary talents derive precisely from his authenticity as a member of a minority. Detective Molloy and Detective Rodriguez are as casually racist and as foul-mouthed as the narrator is enlightened and reserved. Yes, they are men, and Molloy is even a white man. But because they are working-class they are outside the narrator's intuitively perceived center, and this provides them too with authenticity.