Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, March, 2001 by Stephen Wade

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970. Kenneth Millard. Oxford University Press. [pound]9.99 p.b. 328 pages. ISBN 0-19-871178-6.

Kenneth Millard has achieved something quite staggering: he has written a survey of modern American fiction which is very nearly comprehensive. Anyone interested in this writing will know exactly how diverse the subject is, ranging from Chicano writing in the Mexican border areas to new post modern inner city fiction. Any writer attempting to draw together dominant themes and preoccupations from this diversity has to have an organising principle, and Mr Millard's is admirably clear and useful.

The author has arranged the books under subject headings such as 'Sport' and 'The West', and even within this scheme he has managed to accommodate a certain unwieldy breadth of material. Yet, the approach brings some notable triumphs; it places, for instance, Paul Auster and Gish Jen together in the category of 'Language and Power'. It is always hard to place Auster in any category with confidence, but it works here.

Kenneth Millard faces the notion of consensus, and this is central now in literary studies. In his introduction he says, '... there is a heterogeneity of creative languages and of subject matter in American fiction at the end of the twentieth century which is itself worth emphasizing as a fundamental critical value'. In fact, the consensus emerging from these essays is arguably the certainty of a sense of an ending rather than a new frontier of optimism. But as it is a fiction riddled with self-reflexion and guilt, the creativity of these novels is always exciting and never predictable. The book has not been edited in such a way that the more philosophical fiction has been excluded, and that is essential for the work covered in this period.

The question of readership is interesting. One wants to agree completely with Mr Millard's assertion that, 'No-one should feel excluded from passionate engagement with modern fiction; it does not belong to academia' and it is a pleasure to report that his book is intensely readable. People who have a broad interest in the subject but who lack the historical and ideological framework for a fuller, informed reading, will be gently and entertainingly enlightened here.

As to the essays themselves: the virtues of the method used here may be explained with reference to the section on 'imagining Subjectivity', which is something notably problematical in this literature. In the space of a few introductory pages, before an explication of the selected novels, Mr Millard has to condense a certain amount of theoretical thought. In this instance, one of the deepest links between the fiction and the contextual subjects is that of philosophy, and the complex notion of 'the self' as it has been textualised in a culture almost obsessively narcissistic about the social construction of the 'person' in a world dominated by media images. Millard neatly explains: 'The interpretations of this chapter, while not thoroughly Foucauldian, are alert to the linguistic games that writers play in creative attempts to produce on the page a sense of subjectivity that is natural or "authentic"'. Luckily for the general reader, awareness of Michel Foucault does not matter; what is important is that the d ifficult area of existential writing involved here has been placed in a tradition and in a frame of thought.

The conclusion has to be that this is a model for the kind of thematic work that should be more generally on offer now to students of American literature, and it will prove to be a valuable book for undergraduates, while not excluding the enthusiast. It is a book that should open up interest into areas of the literature normally encountered only in academic courses; this is a shame, as the novels dealt with here are, for the most part, full of contemporary interest and always revelatory of the contexts in which they were produced.