Postwar Fiction, 1945–1975

This is Unit Sixteen of American Literature, part two of two: the suburb, the road, the war written twice, and the board's matching question worked in full. Part one ended with an alter ego who took over a novelist's whole shelf. This part is where the unit's governing idea pays off, because everything here is about a self that cannot locate itself inside a system it did not build. Updike follows one man across five novels and four decades of American history, and Cheever examines the New York business world through its effects on the families at home, so the suburb turns out to be a literature of unease inside apparent satisfaction. Nabokov arrives from czarist Russia by way of Cornell and writes a novel narrated by a predator whose charm is the instrument of the deception. Kerouac's beatniks drive across a country after a communal dream. Then the war, written realist in the late forties and absurd two decades later, by Vonnegut who watched Dresden burn from inside it as a prisoner and by Heller, whose title became the language's word for an inescapable rule. Then the postmodernists, and then the drill. By the end you will be able to place the Rabbit novels and Cheever's stories. To account for Nabokov's subject and his narration. To define the Beat Generation. To say why the war was written twice. And to define three tested terms and work the matching question.

Five entries: one man across four decades, a business world seen from the family, and a narrator nobody should trust.

One man, four decades, five books.

AML 1527 John Updike and the Rabbit Novels

Updike wrote of suburban settings, domestic themes and the eastern seaboard, and the witness calls him, like Cheever, a writer of manners. He is best known for five Rabbit books following one man across four decades of American social and political history. Roth is the writer he is most often compared with.

Aimless, adrift, prosperous, dead.

AML 1528 Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom

*Rabbit, Run* of nineteen sixty mirrors the fifties with Angstrom an aimless young husband. *Rabbit Redux* sets him against the counterculture, *Rabbit Is Rich* makes him a prosperous businessman, and *Rabbit at Rest* ends with his death from a heart attack in the eighties. The name Angstrom belongs to Updike, which the board asks.

The business world, from the family.

AML 1529 John Cheever and the Suburban Story

Cheever is called a novelist of manners and is known for elegant, suggestive short stories that examine the New York business world through its effects on businessmen, their wives, children and friends. The witness finds a wry melancholy and a never quite quenched desire in them. The stories outweigh the novels in reputation.

A predator, narrating charmingly.

AML 1530 Vladimir Nabokov and *Lolita*

Nabokov was born into an affluent family in czarist Russia, came to the United States in nineteen forty and taught at Cornell. The witness describes the American edition of nineteen fifty-eight as concerning an educated middle-aged European who becomes infatuated with a twelve-year-old girl. The narrator is a predator and a liar.

A commentary that eats its poem.

AML 1531 Nabokov's Style and the Unreliable Narrator

The witness credits Nabokov with stylistic subtlety, deft satire and ingenious innovations in form, and notes that *Pale Fire* consists of a poem by an imaginary dead poet and a critic's commentary that overwhelms it. The narrator's charm is the instrument of the deception, so beautiful narration can itself be the trap.

Five entries: a road novel, the movement around it, and one war written realist and then absurd.

Wandering America after a dream.

AML 1532 Jack Kerouac and *On the Road*

Kerouac was the son of an impoverished French-Canadian family who met the Beat underground at Columbia University. His best-known novel, of nineteen fifty-seven, describes beatniks wandering through America after an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. *The Dharma Bums* followed in nineteen fifty-eight, and the style is loosely autobiographical.

A counterculture against prosperous conformity.

AML 1533 The Beats as a Movement

The witness defines the Beat Generation as mid-century authors including Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg who represented America's countercultures while criticizing its materialism during an era of conformity and prosperity. City Lights Books in San Francisco published Ginsberg's *Howl and Other Poems*, and his poetry belongs to the next unit.

Dresden, seen from inside.

AML 1534 Kurt Vonnegut and *Slaughterhouse-Five*

Vonnegut witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden on the ground as a prisoner of war and wrote his antiwar novel about it in nineteen sixty-nine, subtitled *The Children's Crusade*. The witness calls him one of the shining lights of the counterculture in the early nineteen seventies. The novel came twenty-four years after the event.

A rule designed to be inescapable.

AML 1535 Joseph Heller and *Catch-22*

Heller cast the Second World War in satirical and absurdist terms in nineteen sixty-one, arguing, in the witness's phrase, that war is laced with insanity. The title names a rule that cannot be escaped, and the phrase entered the language as a term for exactly that trap. The phrase left the novel and became general.

Realism first, absurdity a decade later.

AML 1536 The War Novel After the War

Norman Mailer's *The Naked and the Dead*, of nineteen forty-eight, and James Jones's *From Here to Eternity*, of nineteen fifty-one, used realism verging on grim naturalism and took pains not to glorify combat. Irwin Shaw and Herman Wouk wrote in the same realist vein. The satirical war novels came a decade later.

Eight entries to close: a label its novelists reject, three tested terms, a story that outraged a country, and two drills.

A label its own novelists refuse.

AML 1537 Postmodernism: The Term and the Techniques

The witness calls postmodernism hard to define and notes that Don DeLillo, one of its recognized novelists, rejects the term. Its writers play with language and with the book itself, borrow modernist experiments, and raid detective fiction, horror and science fiction for their materials. A rejected label is still the exam's label.

Stories that keep interrupting themselves.

AML 1538 John Barth and *Lost in the Funhouse*

The witness says realism is the enemy for Barth, whose nineteen sixty-eight book of fourteen stories constantly refers to the processes of writing and reading. His intent is to alert readers to the artificial nature of what they are doing and to keep them out of the illusion. The interruption is the design rather than a fault.

A plot the character must decode.

AML 1539 Thomas Pynchon and *The Crying of Lot 49*

The witness says all of Pynchon's fiction is structured the same way: a vast plot unknown to a main character, whose task becomes to make order out of chaos, a job that devolves on the reader as well. The short novel of nineteen sixty-six concerns a secret postal system. The reader is given the same task.

Three terms, one for each effect.

AML 1540 Metafiction, Paranoia, Entropy

Metafiction is self-conscious fiction that calls attention to its own technique, where the true subject is the writer's consciousness rather than the characters. Paranoia names Pynchon's sense of a hidden vast plot, and entropy, the running down of a universe, is his governing metaphor. These three terms are commonly tested.

Two hours to write, decades of outrage.

AML 1541 Shirley Jackson and "The Lottery"

Jackson wrote the story in under two hours, and *The New Yorker* printed it on the twenty-sixth of June, nineteen forty-eight. The anchor records hundreds of letters and calls, cancelled subscriptions, and readers who believed the event was real and asked where they could go and watch it. Jackson refused to explain her purpose.

Five right pairs, and one wrong.

AML 1542 Matching Author to Character: The Method

The board asks you to pair a character with the writer who made him, and the postwar novelists supply the pairs most often confused. Fix five. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom belongs to John Updike, across five novels and four decades. Alexander Portnoy belongs to Philip Roth, talking at a silent analyst. Holden Caulfield belongs to J. D. Salinger, leaving the boarding school. Augie March belongs to Saul Bellow, the Chicago entrepreneur with the energetic voice. The unnamed narrator of *Invisible Man* belongs to Ralph Ellison, in a cellar lit by stolen electricity. The trap the board sets is Bigger Thomas, who belongs to Richard Wright and not to Ellison, because the two men are the period's two famous Black novelists and their books are ten years apart. Ellison wrote one novel and Wright wrote *Native Son*, so any option pairing Ellison with Bigger Thomas is the distractor.

Four groupings cover the period.

AML 1543 Sorting Postwar Fiction by Its School

Four groupings cover most of what the board asks about this period. The Southern writers, O'Connor, Welty and McCullers, work in gothic settings with violence, dark comedy and a religious or ethical frame. The Jewish-American novelists, Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Singer, are marked by humour, ethical concern and portraits of Jewish communities in the old world and the new. The suburban realists, Cheever, Updike and O'Hara, examine the stress lurking in the shadows of apparent satisfaction. The postmodernists, Pynchon, Barth and Barthelme, attend to how a story is told rather than to the story. Two sit across the lines: Nabokov, an emigre stylist who fed the postmodernists, and Ellison and Baldwin, whose subject is identity rather than ambition. The groupings are the witness's rather than movements each writer joined, and several names could be filed in two of them.

A self that cannot find its place.

AML 1544 The Postwar Novel: Self, System, and Doubt

The thirty years after nineteen forty-five produced a fiction about people who cannot locate themselves inside systems they did not build, and the period's formal experiments follow from that. The material conditions were new: soldiers entering college on the GI Bill, the first graduate writing programmes, a suburban prosperity with its house and car and television, and a Cold War that shaped what could be said. Ellison's unnamed narrator lives in a cellar lit by stolen electricity and states the period's sharpest formulation, that he is invisible because others, blinded by prejudice, will not see him. Baldwin, an essayist before a novelist, carried a preacher's cadence into prose and argued from Paris for an end to separation between the races. In the South, O'Connor put violent comedy at the service of an orthodox Catholic belief and gave her killer a stated objection to Christ raising the dead. The nineteen fifties produced a literature of unease inside apparent satisfaction: Cheever and Updike on the suburb, Bellow and Malamud and Roth on Jewish communities, Salinger's Caulfield walking away from school, Kerouac's beatniks driving after a communal dream. Then the sixties turned outward and the fiction turned reflexive. Metafiction made the writing itself the subject, Barth worked to keep readers out of the illusion, and Pynchon built plots his characters and readers had to decode, with entropy for a metaphor and paranoia for a mood. Vonnegut and Heller finally wrote the war as absurdity two decades after the realists wrote it straight.

That closes the postwar novel. The next unit takes the poetry and the stage of the same years. You can place Updike's five novels following one man from an aimless young husband through prosperity to a heart attack in the eighties, and Cheever's stories examining a business world through the families it came home to. You can account for Nabokov, whose novel is narrated by a predator and whose charm is the instrument of the deception. You can define the Beat Generation as a counterculture criticizing materialism in an era of conformity and prosperity. You can say why the war was written twice, realist and unglorified in the late forties and absurd two decades later by a man who watched Dresden burn as a prisoner and by a man whose title became a word. You can define metafiction, paranoia and entropy. And you can fix the five author-and-character pairs the board confuses, and reject the one wrong pairing it offers.