Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium (review)

Burn, Stephen J.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 231-234 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2006.0017

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de Grazia, and Robert Viscusi, "Little Italy"rather than Italy itself becomes the dominant trope: "just as the immigrants reached back to the land they left to create a cultural space in a new world for their art, so too have their descendents reached back into their Little Italys to create their art" (158). However, these ethnic enclaves "real and imagined" must eventually be escaped, not simply to achieve material success but to achieve a broader understanding of the world outside Little Italy. Gardaphe's refiguration of "Italian American" as a starting point to internationalism is timely given American Studies' recent conceptual shift from the local to the global. Gardaphe proposes a "movement away from Italianit" (Italianness)a term used by Benito Mussolini that smacks of chauvinism and racial essentialismtoward "Italicit" (Italianicity), a term to be associated with an outward-looking sensibility that uses "Italian American" as a starting point for global understanding and an awareness of "multiple identities" (159). Leaving Little Italy is not only a solid primer for those unfamiliar with the field of Italian-American Studies, it is also a rousing call to further research for those already well versed in it: each essay informs and enlightens as it offers new avenues of inquiry. To call the study readable is a gross understatement. Those familiar with Gardaphe's work will instantly recognize the authorial voice in the writing: clear, unpretentious, even welcoming, but never oversimplifying. Because of this very voice, the book is useful to academics and nonacademics alike: indeed all those who wish to reflect upon the Little Italys of their past.

STEVEN J. BELLUSCIO
Borough of Manhattan Community College/ City University of New York

Jeremy Green. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. New York: Palgrave, 2005. vii +246 pp.
At the end of the twentieth century the proximity of the millennium seemed to be on the minds of many American writers. As the 1990s approached, Don DeLillo evidently read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, while in the late nineties Richard Powers filled his novel Gain with portents of millennial change: describing Adventists, setting a character to work at a company called Next Millennium Realty, and dating a narrative's action "just this side of millennium's

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end." Jeremy Green has much to say about writers such as DeLillo and Powers, but despite its subtitle, his study Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium is not strictly speaking an account of such examples of the millennium molding the American literary imagination but is rather an exploration of how writers in this period reacted to larger social changes at the end of the century. The background to Green's study is derived from Pierre Bourdieu's account of the literary field, leading to an approach that, Green explains, contextualizes a work amid "that ensemble of interlocking practices and institutions, including the publishing industry, the media, and the university, that constitutes, often in unexamined or unconscious ways, the environment for the practice and understanding of literature" (3). The major disruptions within the literary field that preoccupy Green include the diminished audience for literary fiction in a "culture of distraction" (vii), anxieties about what constitutes literary value, and the potential threat to print culture presented by the rise of the new media. Over the course of five chapters Green examines how John Barth, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Kathryn Davis, David Markson, Don DeLillo, and Evan Dara have attempted to respond to these changes. Green begins his study with a chapter that takes recent announcements of the end of postmodernism as an opportunity to look back at the movement, examining the development of literary postmodernism in the US, the importance of formal developments to the period, and closing with an account of "a profound shift in the relations between capital and culture" that "underlies the changes in the literary field" (34). The economic developments (the move from Fordism toward new informational economies) that underpin this shift alter the nature of publishing and bookselling, as well the role of academia. In particular, Green describes how bookselling has changed, with large national book chains pressing "smaller, often better-informed and committed independent stores" out of business (38). Since large stores are inevitably geared toward stocking works with the largest sales potential, this shift, he contends, limits the market for challenging work. It is curious, however, that Green neglects to mention, here, the place that the rise of the internet bookstore over the last ten years has in this equation. Moving from this background material toward his chosen novelists, Green has Barth and Roth step forward. The attitudes of both these writers, Green argues, have been shaped by changes in the literary field to the extent that they can now be seen as cultural pessimists who see "the cultural environment in the last years of the century" as "in various ways inimical to their literary endeavors" (46). Their apparently gloomy outlook allows Green to situate their work alongside the conservative responses to cultural and technological

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developments essayed by Sven Birkerts, Harold Bloom, and Alvin Kernan. Green's approach depends upon reading both the stock-taking manifestoes of writers as well as their novels, so he gives a detailed explication of Barth's essays before he engages with his millennial novel, Coming Soon!!! An examination of the novel's uneasy relation to electronic media leads to the conclusion that the "novel must, Barth implies, embrace its irrelevance if it is to retain its essential connection to tradition" (63). Roth, Green argues, is also preoccupied with tradition, and through a reading of The Human Stain he explores Roth's account of how the academy has discarded the literary tradition in spite of the role that history can play in shaping the self. These accounts of cultural decline offered by elderly male writers are offset by a three-page examination of Carole Maso's attack on such elegies for the novel in her fragmented essay "Rupture, Verge, and Precipice; Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not." The next chapter, entitled "Jonathan Franzen, Oprah Winfrey, and the Social Novel" might be considered the central chapter of Green's investigation, since Green devotes more space to Franzen than he does to any other author. A survey of the impact Oprah's Book Club has had on the literary field is followed by a discussion of the way Franzen's essays negotiate the author's fraught relation to mainstream culture. Several accounts of Franzen's dispute with Oprah have already been written, while (depressingly) very little scholarly attention has been directed toward his work, so it is refreshing to see Green devote the end of this chapter to examining the account of identity embedded in The Corrections and carefully developing the novel's connection to Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. Green follows Franzen with a study of three writers who "participate in the elegiac discourse, but resist the cultural fatalism that so often goes along with it" (119). In this chapter he selects Powers's Galatea 2.2, Davis's Walking Tour, and Markson's sparse fictions Wittgenstein's Mistress and Reader's Block as representative texts. Although the agents of cultural amnesia are different for each writer either the Humanities have announced that the age of reading is dead (Powers), the electronic age is plunging the world into a "postliterate condition" (Davis), or an amnesiac literary culture has deemed literary allusion pretentious (Markson)each of these writers seeks in different ways to respond to "the problem of a break in the continuum of cultural memory" (162). The chapter on DeLillo is drawn from an essay that first appeared in the pages of this journal (see Mfs 45.3) and follows "DeLillo's investigation of the shifting boundaries between public and private through spectacles of violence" (164) with particular attention to Libra and Underworld. This is followed by a final textual studyan intriguing examination of the ghostly, atomized voices that make up

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Evan Dara's neglected novel The Lost Scrapbook. Green presents an alert elucidation of some of the extraliterary references in the novel before concluding that Dara's novel offers itself "quite remarkably, as a utopian promise in an age seemingly devoid of all utopias" (209). This survey is inevitably selective, and since Green samples such recent fiction his book is likely (again inevitably) to raise a degree of controversy over its selection of texts. I was disappointed, for example, that David Foster Wallace's anatomy of a postmillennial American in Infinite Jest was not discussed, but Green should be congratulated for drawing to attention to such talented, and frequently overlooked, writers as David Markson and Evan Dara. Indeed, it is clear that Green is happier dealing with more experimental works, and although he begins his study by stating that his work "has been provoked by enthusiasm for the writers I address" (viii), he is not afraid at times to criticize the works of his chosen writers. This is particularly true of writers who are more conservative formally: Philip Roth's work, for example, is marred for Green by its "offensive caricatures and disabling limitations" (70); similarly, the theorizing of Jonathan Franzena writer who seems to rouse distinctly mixed feelings in Greenis deemed to be "tainted with complacency" (96). Green's preference for innovative writers does not detract from his study, and as he moves between text and social background, there are many illuminating insights and some valuable close textual readings. His reluctance to offer a clear guide to where periods begin and end, however, does occasionally lead to some ambiguity. DeLillo, for example, is introduced at the start of the book as a figure whose novels "bridge the two generations of postmodern fiction" (4), but later he is firmly placed in a list of "first-generation postmodernists" (104). In that same list is William Gaddis, but his work is later classified as an example of "late modernism" (149). Although he prefaces the study with the observation that he is not attempting "a typology by which new writing might be categorized" (3) a stronger taxonomical element would have helped clarify such designations. Nevertheless, as Green's book demonstrates, the 1990s produced an unusually rich body of American writing, and his study offers a useful account of how writers adapted to the changing literary environment of the late century.

STEPHEN J. BURN
Northern Michigan University