instruct us in the possibilities of freedom, adventure, ornindividual integrity. Except for the two or three mostlynthird-rate novelists whose talent for self-caricature andnbitchery has endeared them to talk-show audiences thatnknow nothing of their books, the best of our writers todaynare ignored by the popular media unless and until they arenarrested for disturbing the peace or manage to win thenNobel Prize. It is inconceivable that there is a novelistnamong us at this time who would be met b>’ reporters atnKennedy Airport as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, even writersnlike Louis Bromfield and Pearl Buck used regularly to benmet when their ships arrived in New York from Europe.nWe may pass o’er the more obvious and cliched reasonsnwhy these things are so: how artists of all kinds have lostncelebrity status in a time when only regular media appearancencan, hove’er temporarily, confer such status; how thenno’el has declined in influence with the decline in thenhabit of serious reading and with the rise of the dictatorshipnnow exercised by teleision over the limited powers of massnpublic attention. These are factors we may cite withoutnengaging the more complex realities of the problem. It isnmuch more to the point to suggest that the authority of thennoel ne’er has been and probably neer can be iewed asnseparable from the nature and quality of the humannexperience which, at any historical moment, may form itsncentral subject matter. It is even possible that the novel willnbe most deeply influential at those moments when it is ablento explore areas of experience that are not yet completelynfamiliar to the reading public, thus functioning in its classicnrole as literally a bringer of the news, a discoverer of what isnindeed noel.nThese moments will usually coincide with periods ofnprofound social dislocation such as the rise of the mercantilenmiddle class out of the collapsing order of feudalism—anprocess in which the noel as we know it in fact began—ornthey ma- be typified by radical changes in manners andnmorals of the kind that tend to follow^ major wars. They maynalso occur during the emergence of ethnic, racial, regional,nand sexual subcultures in which the initial struggle out ofnfeudalism of the middle class is recapitulated in the strugglen• for freedom, acceptance, and personal autonomy of Jews,nblacks, proincial Southerners or Midwesterners, women,nor homosexuals—groups, in short, that have becomenne\l’ conscious of themselves and the special nature ofntheir minority or regional experiences.nSuch central social transformations have over the pastncentury proided the American novel with a continuouslynreplenishing supply of vital materials, and usually theirnitality has depended in very large measure on the factor ofnnoelty, the opportunity afforded novelists by historicalnaccident to express for the first time hitherto unknown ornunexplored modes of feeling and being, new experiencesnthat in some ultimate way were working to reshape thencharacter of our national life and in the process werenintroducing fresh perspectives from which to envision thenindiidual in some significantly altered relahon to that life.nThese experiences will of course have been shared by somenperhaps substantial part of the reading public. But they willnnot have been made understandable or imaginatively availablento the public until recreated and evaluated in the worknof an important novelist.nThe history of the 20th-century novel in this countrynmight in fact be described as an evolutionary developmentnin which each successive generation of novelists has discoverednand appropriated to its particular creative use one ornmore of the emerging social situations of its age, then hasngradually—or in some eases very quickly—depleted it of itsnpotential as imaginative material, in time, as a rule, with itsnabsorption into the homogenizing system of the establishednnational community. There seems always to be a momentnwhen a nascent subculture, whether racial, ethnic, regional,nor sexual, is, because of its newness or its bizarrencharacter, a particularly fertile ground for the novel, just asnthere comes a moment when its materials will have grownnfamiliar to the point of becoming unusable cliches and willnlose authority to a more recentiy emerged subculturenpossessing newer and as yet unfamiliar materials.nThis is a major reason why it is possible to speak of thenstages in the growth of the American novel in terms ofngeographical locale and minority-group interest—and thenprocess has repeatedly involved the conquest, consolidation,nand finally the depletion and abandonment of newnterritories of social and imaginative experience. Beginningnearly in the 19th century and continuing through the yearsnfollowing the Second World War, we ha-e had the NewnEngland novel of Hawthorne and Melville; the novel of thendeeloping Western frontier of James Fenimore Cooper; thenmore deeply Western novel of Mark Twain; the internationalnand New York novel of James and Wharton; the manynworks appearing after the turn of this century whichndramatized the plight of the Midwestern and Southernnadolescent struggHng to escape the suffocations of the smallntown; other works which explored the usually destructivenconsequences of the adolescent’s escape—to New York,nLong Island, Paris, and the South of France. Later duringnthe 30’s there were the large numbers of novels depictingnthe new Depression-created subculture of the economicallyndispossessed.nAfter World War II, the racial and ethnic novel cameninto authority as the Anglo-Saxon Midwestern experiencenceased to be the typifying experience of most Americannwriters. During that same period the Southern renaissanceninitiated by Faulkner reached maturity in the work ofnseveral writers who were among the last to derive theirnprimary materials from geographical locale, materialsnwhich in their case were ultimately devitalized as a result ofnthe proliferation of novels composed of self-parodisticnSouthernesque formulations. At the present time the best ofnour novelists seem, for reasons later to be discussed, to haventurned away from the direct presentation of regional andnsubcultural experience, leaving the field largely to thennewer women writers who, now that the homosexuals havenhad their day, are speaking for what may well be the solenremaining American subculture still capable of providingnrelatively fresh materials for the novel.nAn obsessive hunger for new experience and a dispositionnto seek it in the actualities of the social world rather thannproduce it imaginatively—these have been highly visiblencharacteristics of our writers for as long as we have had andistinctively national literature. But what is perhaps lessneident is how often their pursuit of novelty in material isnjoined with a preoccupation with the pursuit and explora-nnn0CT0BER1986/11n