American Fiction: Forgetting the Ordinary Truths

In a country that builds obsolescence into its automobiles, movie stars, and protest movements, the same calculated mortality appears in its literary fiction and in the boldly plausible generalizations of its critics. A mere seven years ago Leslie Fiedler, with his characteristic blend of hyperbole and Zeitgeist, announced the birth of a new breed of American novelist, “the new mutants,” whose subject was nothing less than the end of man. In their brutal mockery of the American sc...