The Modern Novel and the Broken World

The idea

American fiction between the wars is written by people who no longer trusted the vocabulary they had inherited, and the technical innovations follow from that distrust. The generation Gertrude Stein called lost had come through a war that made words like glory and honour sound false, and it wrote in Paris on a favourable exchange rate while absorbing Freud and a godless view of the world. Fitzgerald put the decade's money on the page, and in The Great Gatsby built a short patterned novel around a man reaching for a green light across a bay, a valley of industrial ash between the mansions and the city, and a faded billboard whose enormous blue eyes a grieving man mistakes for God. Hemingway stripped the sentence to its nouns and verbs and formulated the principle behind it: omit what you know and the omission will strengthen the story, which is why a whole story about an operation never names it and a novel's central wound is never described. Faulkner went the other way, into sentences that accumulate for a page, invented a Mississippi county and reused its families, narrated a novel's first section through a man with no sense of time and another novel through fifteen voices including a dead woman's, and told the Nobel committee that the only subject worth writing is the human heart in conflict with itself. Around those three, the period's range: Cather's immigrant women holding the prairie, Anderson's cycle of small-town grotesques who each seized one truth too hard, Steinbeck's Joads on the road out of a dust bowl with interchapters widening one family into a migration, Dos Passos's collage of newsreels and biographies, and Wright's Native Son, which put Bigger Thomas and the society that made him on trial together. On the stage O'Neill became the first American playwright to take the Nobel, and Wilder emptied the stage to a bare platform and a Stage Manager.