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By Root 914 0

had been taking Broderick Crawford lessons on the sly.) This sideshow stoked anticipation for the novel, like a scuffle at the prefight weigh-in before a major rumble. Excerpted in Theodore Solotaroff’s New American Review, the most exciting literary publication of the late sixties and the seventies, its back issues as indispensable to comprehending the political and cultural storm systems of the time as any retrospective overview, American Mischief had the makings of a Big Mac of a succès de scandale, its picaresque effrontery something that the literary establishment was keen to embrace now that Roth’s Portnoy had snapped the paper chains of propriety and everyone wanted to be with-it. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and indeed was a succès de scandale. I glanced at American Mischief years later, and it already seemed an overwrought period piece, overfueled by the same urgency that juiced even our most eagle-eyebrowed confabulators (Philip Roth in Our Gang and The Great American Novel, Robert Coover with The Public Burning) to overswing wildly for the fences and twist themselves into Twizzler sticks in their efforts to do vigilante justice to the grotesque, hyperthyroid surrealism of the news in the age of Nixon.

I wasn’t a size queen when it came to fiction, either as reader or as reviewer, though I wasn’t as averse to heavy lifting as the devilishly suave Anatole Broyard, one of the Times’s daily reviewers, comically notorious among his critical brethren for his penchant for choosing the slimmest volume from the galley pile for his accomplished caresses and tango moves. Aroused by Books his 1974 collection was called, and as review collections go, it holds up much better than most precisely because its author doesn’t apologize for prizing the pleasure principle over moral instruction, spiritual enlightenment, and intellectual muscle-building. Reviewing Alfred Kazin’s Bright Book of Life, that cavalcade of American literature’s Easter Island heads from Faulkner to Bellow and beyond, Broyard writes, “Mr. Kazin is what I would call an ideophile. He’s in love with ideas, but though he generously shares that love with us, I know that I feel a certain lack … [I]t’s all just a bit too platonic. Mr. Kazin seems to think about fiction more than he feels it.” And Broyard was definitely more of a fingers-flexing feeler (which is to take nothing away from how keen, elegant, and mobile his spidery mind was), as was Alfred Chester, who wrote in a review of John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, “Despite the currency of the phrase, we really don’t want writers to say anything because, as soon as they do, we get bored. What we do want is for them to feel something, and to make us feel something.” Then Chester broke into peroration: “Teach us, O Artists, not to settle for guilts and anxieties, for twitches and embarrassments! Teach us, O Artists, to feel again! Because emotions are the only thing that artists have to say—and emotion can make us gigantic and tragic. (Ideas never can; they can only follow, like dogs. Ideas, however pertinent, however great, tend to remove us from reality; feelings always bring us back again. Ideas never explain experience; feelings are experience.)”

Whether or not a novel “holds up” over time means less to me than whether or not it holds on—if you can open any page and hear a voice coming through like a hypnosis countdown, initiating a one-on-one spell. When I think about the novels from the seventies, it isn’t the big kahunas that project staying power in my crabby affections, bashing best sellers such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose prodigious set pieces were like the gargantuan meals in La Grande Bouffe, a grandiose glut with scatty arias of word-spew and a sprawling cast of characters with wacky, Dr. Strangelovian names (Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe, Lucifer Amp, Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz); Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which constructs a too-unwieldy, top-heavy, and monument-minded edifice for the tragic unraveling of the poet of so much/too much promise undone by insanity, Bellow’s