Lucking Out - James Wolcott [126]
It was on such occasions that you felt literary fiction didn’t need any additional enemies, its own advocates and exemplars were doing such a swell job draining its blood banks. Nevertheless, literary quarterlies and critics with the long chins of undertakers found no dearth of suspects responsible for the slow, desert-crawling Death of the Novel, done in like an Agatha Christie victim by multiple assailants, each taking a stab at the distinguished old crone, a mixture of the usual suspects and new culprits: rock music with its invasive rush of pure pop for now people; the summer movie blockbuster, beginning with Jaws in 1975, its shark fin converting the American imagination into a drive-in screen; the academicization of literature by professors full of French cheese (a favorite theme of Gore Vidal’s, whose essay “American Plastic” joined Roland Barthes and John Barth in unholy wedlock); the aversion of fiction writers to risk bunions and discourtesy at their tender expense to do Dickensian-Balzacian reporting of institutions, status-spheres, and the hidden gear-works of class (an argument strung like Christmas tree lights by Tom Wolfe in his introduction to the anthology The New Journalism); the inadequacy of fiction to keep up with the acceleration and jump-cut transitions of our minds, the Godzilla rampages of breakout of America’s once-repressed derangements, something Seymour Krim pegged back in 1967: “If living itself often seems more and more like a nonstop LSD trip … what fertile new truths can most fiction writers tell us about a reality that has far outraced them at their own game? How can they compete with the absurd and startling authorship of each new hour?” This was the clamorous challenge that the narrator of Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things was mockingly determined to confront with a meat-hook in each hand: “My next book will be a novel, for you, tracing the fortunes of a typical American family, from the years of Depression up through the Swinging Sixties. It will be written in Abracadabra, have a number of brutally candid sex scenes, and the hero will be an alienated Jew who likes to Suck Off Christian movie stars and Fuck black girls in the Ass. Confronting Contemporary America in a Big Way. There will be no plot and I will exhaust everybody in sight by listing, at every opportunity, the contents of anyone’s pockets and wallets and handbags.”
Two years later, in 1973, a novel following Sorrentino’s recipe for bathtub gin was published that truly confronted America in a big way, poking it in the face with a stubby penis, its very title a high-stakes provocation: American Mischief. Written by Alan Lelchuk, American Mischief was a campus novel turned reeducation camp whose inmates were well-known New York intellectuals: “ ‘A.’ has a ‘boyish’ unruly forelock and a propensity for going down on nubile seamen; ‘E.’ is a professor at Columbia, an Arnold and Forster specialist, who as a phase of his re-education is forced to watch fellatio being performed on Lelchuk’s narrator (by a girl, thank God!),” Marvin Mudrick recapped in his review. A. was clearly meant to flag the multidisciplinary social thinker Paul Goodman, and E. could be none other than the patron saint of moral seriousness and T. S. Eliot tea-cozy decorum, Lionel Trilling, the author of full-length studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster. Norman Mailer appeared in American Mischief under his real name, assassinated with a bullet up his ass, perhaps intended as a bit of literary back atcha for the transgressive buggery of the German maid in Mailer’s American Dream. But the real-life Mailer wasn’t amused or appreciative of such a one-gun salute, vowing, “By the time this is over, Lelchuk, you ain’t going to be nothin’ but a hank of hair and some fillings.” (It was always a treat when Mailer talked Southern sheriff, as if he