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The 1980s gave critics much to complain about, beginning with a literary
trend often called minimalism, but also, less sympathetically, "K-Mart
realism." Was minimalism indeed the prevailing American literary form of
the 1980s? It certainly seemed to be, what with The New Yorker and Esquire, two
of the foremost American showcases for literary fiction, firmly in its thrall
and so many emerging writers naming Raymond Carver as their model. Carver wrote
spare, stoic prose about working-class people whose lives hover at the brink of
despair. In his style, if not his subject matter, he was an heir to Hemingway,
and after his death in 1988 he was held in particularly great reverence. The
teacher and editor Gordon Lish (whose own experimental novels would suggest a
greater affinity with the metafictionists) was a tireless advocate for
minimalism and is known to have stripped Carver's early stories down to their
very bones.
Carver wrote mostly short stories, a form that had come to seem marginal in
the 1960s and 1970s as fewer and fewer magazines published fiction. The short
story, however, proved to be ideally suited to the needs of the writing
workshops and MFA programs in creative writing that were sprouting up in many
universities during the 1980s. Critics who disliked minimalism often blamed the
trend on these programs--particularly the creative writing program at the
University of Iowa--and accused universities of graduating indistinguishable
writers of "cookie cutter" fiction. It's true that the clean,
declarative sentences that are a signal trait of minimalist fiction are the
easiest kind of competent writing to teach, and that minimalism's restrained,
quirk-free, almost documentary approach is the least likely to offend or
irritate a classroom of ten fellow writers. However, it should be noted that
university-level creative writing programs also trained such original voices as
David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson (not to mention Flannery O'Connor).
There did seem to be an overwhelming number of young minimalist writers
coming up in the mid-1980s, and they did tend to sound an awful lot alike, a
situation that, more than anything else, may have stoked the irritation of
critics. That irritation, however, paled in comparison with the seething wrath
inspired by the rise of the Brat Pack, a trio of mediagenic young writers who
emerged at about the same time. The actual books written by Jay McInerney, Brett
Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz don't have much in common, but the three became
permanently linked in the minds of the public. They stood for an attempt to
transplant the devices of celebrity culture into the literary world, and despite
the handsome sales figures the Brat Pack enjoyed at first, in the end the
operation was not a success.
The Brat Pack were young, they photographed well, and they seemed to lead
exciting, glamorous lives. McInerney and Ellis hung out at nightclubs with pop
stars and models, and Janowitz even made a video that was aired on MTV. The
press treated them as the voices of a generation, and people who didn't read a
lot of novels bought and read the Brat Pack's books. But the core audience for
literary fiction has always regarded them with suspicion. Ten years later, it's
remarkable how much outright animosity still greets mention of their names,
considering that, since the 1980s, they've had lackluster careers and have
exerted no noticeable influence on American fiction. For those idealists who
cherish the literary world as the last refuge of the genuine and profound in a
larger culture driven by artifice and hype, the Brat Pack interlude is a past
trauma whose psychic bruises have yet to heal. Publicity certainly does sell
books, but many readers remain leery of any new writer introduced to the public
with an excessive amount of fanfare; the writer's second book, justly or not, is
quite likely to tank.
In Britain, an influx of fiction from writers dubbed
"post-colonial" paralleled the multicultural movement in the United
States during the 1970s and 1980s, after the Angry Young Men of the 1950s and
1960s (a loose grouping of writers, including Kingsley Amis and John Braine, who
offered an often scabrous alternative to the genteel upper-middle-class
literature of the preceeding generation) had for the most part devolved into
unvarnished misanthropy and neo-conservatism. At the same time, the creative
writing program at the University at East Anglia founded by Malcolm Bradbury and
Angus Wilson fostered an impressive roster of graduates, including Rose Tremain,
Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan--a decidedly eclectic crew. McEwan became
associated with Julian Barnes and Martin Amis as part of a cadre of stylish,
sometimes controversial younger writers, championed by Bill Buford, an American
who had taken over the editing of the literary journal Granta. In 1983 Granta
put out a list of "The 20 Best British Novelists Under 40" that proved
remarkably prophetic and furthered the impression among minimalism-weary
American readers that most of the really exciting new books were being written
on the other side of the Atlantic or in Latin America, which was exporting such
magic realists as the Nobel Prize-winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez to a worldwide
readership starved for epic, imaginative fiction.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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