Wood: The Blue River of Truth

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Always interesting, James Wood's review of _Realist Vision_ by Peter 
Brooks ranges far.

'The Blue River of Truth' by James Wood. _New Republic_ 233.5, 1 August 
2005, pp. 23-27.

Excerpt
[...] The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question 
of realism. Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a fault 
line emerges, with "realists" and traditionalists on one side, and 
postmodernists and experimentalists on the other. Both sides are 
committed, apparently, to libelous caricatures that they neither enjoy 
nor really believe in. No comparable struggle exists in British 
fiction, because experimental fiction in England has never been 
substantial enough to mount a decent campaign against the dominant 
discourse. But the avant-garde in America in the 1960s was full of 
talent and vigor. In addition to writers such as John Barth and Gilbert 
Sorrentino, who never reached popular audiences, many of the 
avant-gardists of that period became mainstreamists, notably Thomas 
Pynchon and the delightful story-writer Donald Barthelme, and William 
Gass, and the unclassifiable Kurt Vonnegut. The heirs of this era of 
experiment might include Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, 
Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, and Ben Marcus, all very different from one 
another and of different ages, but all committed in one way or another 
to going beyond the realist inheritance. An unexpected testament to the 
success of avant-gardism in America was offered in 1986 by Philip 
Roth's _The Counterlife_, which took just what it needed from 
postmodern narrative games in order to make a fundamentally 
metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and 
narrating, a life. And Jonathan Franzen's writhings about whether he is 
a highbrow artist or a popular entertainer, and his tortured 
negotiations with the legacies of DeLillo and Gaddis, are difficult to 
imagine without the challenge of American experimentalism in the 1960s 
and 1970s. [...]

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