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[...] Of course it's true that an unprecedented number of young Americans have big disposable incomes, fine tastes, nice things, competent accountants, access to exotic intoxicants, attractive sex partners, and are still deeply unhappy. All right. Some good fiction has held up a mercilessly powder-…

[...] The refracted world of Proust and Musil, Schulz and Stein, Borges and Faulkner has, post-War, exploded into diffraction, a weird, protracted Manhattan Project staffed by Robbe-Grillet, Grass, Nabokov, Sorrentino, Bohl, Barth, McCarthy, García Márquez, Puig, Kundera, Gass, Fuentes, Elkin, Dono…

[...] The climate for the "next" generation of American writers--should we decide to inhale rather than die--is aswirl with what seems like long-overdue appreciation for the weird achievements of such aliens as Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes, Poulet, Gadamer, de Man. The demise of Stru…

[...] The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader--titillates, repulses, excites, transports him--without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that re…

But now try to recall the last time you saw the "hero" die within his drama's narrative frame. [...] The natural consequences is that today's dramatic heroes tend to be "immortal" within the frame that makes them heroes and objects of identification [...] I claim that the fact that we are strongly …