This book, which began as a doctoral dissertation submitted in early 1999, attempts to answer the deceptively simple question asked by Paul Auster in the title of one of his essays, "Why Write?" Serious novelists, despite a climate of decentralizing theory, exhausted literary experimentation, and the prospect of a marginal role, at best, in popular consciousness, continue to enter the fray in hopes of carving out their own niche. In the process, some of our most intriguing writers have manifested similarities in their work that suggest a new strain of postmodern fiction (to rely on an overused and under-specific term) clearly distinct from the blueprint drawn up by celebrated forebears like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and John Barth. Of course, the real motivating question in exploring this work was, as in many studies of contemporary fiction, "why read?" and for me the novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson and Tim O’Brien provide some of the most convincing answers. |