It's hard to think of a time in American letters when a generation of novelists dominated America's literary spotlight for so long. McCarthy and Pynchon started out in the early '60s. Updike and Roth have been at it since the mid-'50s; Mailer made his debut in 1945 (!), around the time critics were looking for an heir to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The magnitude of reputations this group has built makes award-giving almost futile. "Roth, who has won the award twice, was never the front runner," wrote National Book Award judge Marianne Wiggins in the Los Angeles Times, explaining why Everyman didn't make the NBA's short list. "[I]t seemed insulting to keep him on the list knowing he would lose. So we dropped him."
If honoring them feels redundant, unseating them has proven impossible. In 1996, David Foster Wallace published a slashing essay in The New York Observer, which began "Mailer, Updike, Roth—the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar American fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it." The piece caused a stir—would this be the executioner's sword?—but it was not to be. Updike, Mailer and Roth have published a combined 21 books since then, scooping up several awards along the way. Roth finally got his Pulitzer, Updike his PEN/Faulkner and Mailer a moment of grudging affection (and a rightful scold) from Toni Morrison, who presented him with a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation. His words that night? "I feel like a carriage-maker watching the disappearance of his trade."
Is the American novel dying or is it just its readership? There is no shortage of talented young fiction writers in the U.S., but the reluctance of readers—except in a few cases—to read them in great numbers says less about style and more about who the country feels comfortable addressing them on its two dominant anxieties—terrorism and technology. This past summer, the normally press-shy Updike traveled to Washington to speak at the annual Book Expo America, a gathering of booksellers and publishers. There, Updike delivered an impassioned defense of the written word and the printed page—both of which have been losing out to electronic media. "You are the salt of the book world," Updike told the crowd. "You confront, or, as they saw now, interface with, that rare American beast who is willing to put down $25 for a book." In an ironic twist, Updike's speech was heard by thousands more over the Internet as a podcast.
There is a generational element to this yearning for the times to be a-changing back: Readers, surveys have shown, are getting older, and younger readers are reading less. Understandably, this makes for a more conservative audience. So it counts that unlike Richard Powers, heralded author of the recent novel The Echo Maker, Updike and his compatriots were born before television—not to mention the atomic bomb. Powers learned to code software before he learned to write. Updike learned to write when computers were the size of battleships. He even once wrote a poem to his new word processor, a kind of blessing of a new leap in technology.
The note on writers' instruments is not some picayune detail, as even Powers himself has noted. "We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires," he said recently in an interview. "They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing." It will be interesting to see how many writers grow comfortable with this sentiment. Technology is and always has been equated with a type of spiritual death to a certain kind of American writer. Thoreau was unequivocal about the destruction wrought by the railroad on Walden Pond; in Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer attempted to link Hemingway's death with what he perceived to be technology's replacement of the masculine. "Now the greatest living romantic was dead," he wrote of the great writer's suicide. "Technology would fill the pause."
It pays to have had ringside seats to these developments. And the faster technology moves—and the deeper it becomes embedded into Americans' consciousness—the better older writers will be to view its march. They, after all, have warily watched its creep, especially the way technology has diluted the moral responsibility of war without lessening its consequences. Not surprisingly, Cormac McCarthy's The Road involves a catastrophic use of the single most powerful invention—the atomic bomb. In Pynchon's Against the Day, a potential plot to steal the earth's electromagnetic current is wrapped up in the rise of global fascism and perennial war.
For all the militaristic SUVs Americans drive and the giant home values some are enjoying—both of which feature prominently in Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land—there is a great, humming anxiety that these older novelists have a purchase on, because they were alive to remember a time when a similar feeling brought about the very worst. And yet it goes deeper than the scar of World War II. Americans know our feet are planted on stolen ground. Our religion—and most of us are Christians, and a whopping percentage of those that are claim to be born-again—says there is going to be a reckoning for our trespasses. In The Shape of Things to Come, cultural critic Greil Marcus argued that America's Puritan roots had made it fond of prophecy. A glimpse at these current voices might say it means we have a voluptuous yearning for doom.
Here is where terrorism comes in. Nonfiction bookshelves reveal Americans want to fathom extremism's roots and causes, but fiction tells a different story. And so we wind up with Roth's fantasy, The Plot Against America, set during an alternate World War II but clearly alluding to the present day, and Updike's Terrorist, a fascinating, if deeply flawed, meditation on fear in the form of a thriller. Coasting through the abandoned wreck of urban New Jersey, Updike emerged with an implied criticism of his country stunning in its bleakness. His homegrown suicide bomber sees an America whose greed for development has killed its cities, whose entertainment has sold out the vaunted American dream to an advertising slogan, whose cynicism allowed its values to grow decadent.
Americans are beginning to realize the laser-guided hurting bombs we are building and dropping across the globe do not come attached with mimeographs of the Bill of Rights or a definition of freedom. We know our national self-perception has become dangerously askew from how we are actually seen (and what our government does) abroad. But do we want this spelled out? Whom do we want speaking to our subconscious about it? Certainly part of the U.S. (and perhaps part of its book reviews) wants older, white men to remain at the top of our fiction heap; there is also no question that these writers' talents are manifest. But a large part of the cultural authority wielded by novelists like Mailer, Updike, Pynchon, McCarthy and Roth has to do with the connection they have to the past. They remember the devastation of World War II; they traveled in a Europe flattened by war; they remember when it came down to it, a novel couldn't stop a world conflict from consuming 62 million lives, or a bomb, for that matter. They remember there could just as easily have been no coming back from that war. One can forgive a country for wanting to hold on to such knowledge a while longer.