Excerpts Fortune Article--and TRP

[Richard Romeo]

                                    Fortune


                                  March 6, 2000



HEADLINE: 'Sister Carrie' Is Gone For Good;
We all work; many of us are defined by it. Then why is the workplace so 
absent from contemporary
fiction?

BYLINE: James Wood

BODY:
   In 1970, Vladimir Nabokov was visited in Switzerland by Charles Givan, a 
graduate student from California who was going to teach creative writing. 
Nabokov was imperiously skeptical about the whole
enterprise, and sighingly swatted away the idea that one might learn 
creativity. At least, he supposed, Givan's students could be taught to avoid 
cliche. Then he proposed another lesson: "They could learn what
a dentist does--learn about different professions. That's very 
old-fashioned. Flaubert's idea. Learn the little
secrets of a trade, of the different professions, so that they can write 
about them." ....

Busyness, rather than business, has been the
novelist's quarry--the task of moving characters about, from house to house 
or from town to town. The English novel's roots are in Elizabethan 
travelers' journals. The picaresque novel, in which a character roams freely 
from place to place, is the natural fruit of these roots and is still 
popular; it was brilliantly
mimicked by Thomas Pynchon in his recent Mason & Dixon. There is probably 
also some kind of unconscious connection between physical and mental 
movement: If one needs to be free from
encumbrance to travel, then one needs the same freedom to engage in mental 
travel. Who is ever actually
employed in Dostoevsky or Woolf or Beckett?
...
.


....

There is something vivid in this, since the novelist's task is then to 
disinter the human from the pile of
machinery that has encrusted him, to show the suffering human. But nowadays 
we are ghosts, and the
connections we have to making things are spectral; things are made, things 
arrive, in the night while we
sleep. Unsurprisingly, American fiction has responded to this state of 
affairs by itself becoming somewhat
spectral. In the absence of real connection between each other and between 
ourselves and our jobs,
several major novelists have insisted on underground connections, on 
invisible linkages that may be
revealed, in paranoid fashion, to be conspiracies. Thomas Pynchon is the 
master of this analysis, and as
long ago as 1966 wrote, in The Crying of Lot 49, in praise of the invisible 
technologies of communication
that connect us, "the very copper rigging and secular miracle of 
communication...the dumb voltages
flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard 
messages." Don DeLillo's Underworld
proves him a superb disciple of Pynchon's. In Underworld, DeLillo uses 
waste--garbage disposal and its
technology--as a kind of symbol of the hidden or repressed connections that 
secretly bind us together. One
of his characters, Brian Glassic, works for a company called Waste 
Containment. In one scene he stands
before the huge landfill on Staten Island: "To understand all this. To 
penetrate the secret. The mountain
was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it 
existed except the
engineers...a unique cultural deposit...and he saw himself for the first 
time as a member of an esoteric
order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, 
the waste managers, the compost
technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a 
park one day out of every kind
of used and eroded object of desire."

DeLillo captures the sense of a whole area of work as closed and secretive, 
and in this sense authentically
modern (and paranoid-sinister to boot). But DeLillo is also an old-fashioned 
novelist, in that capitalism is to
him a pulsing mystery, a web of impersonal malign forces, much as the old 
naturalists such as Dreiser and
Frank Norris saw it. The difference is that the old naturalists always saw a 
human being at the heart of the
web, trapped and wriggling; DeLillo sees, with marvelous acuity, only the 
web itself. That is a
new-fashioned difference.





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