![]() It is instead a fiction of a different scope – devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture – and it is entirely appropriate that its primary form is the short story and that it is so conspicuously part of the American short story revival. It is not a fiction devoted to making the large historical statement. ![]() ![]() The work of John Bart, William Gaddis or Thomas Pynchon seem pretentious in comparison. It is not self-consciously experimental like so much of the writing – variously described as ‘postmodern’, ‘postcontemporary’ or ‘deconstructionist’ – that was published in the sixties and seventies. It is not heroic or grand: the epic ambitions of Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow seem, in contrast, inflated, strange, even false. It is not only unlike anything currently written in Britain, but it is also remarkably unlike what American fiction is usually understood to be. A new fiction seems to be emerging from America, and it is a fiction of a peculiar and haunting kind. ![]()
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