Postmodernist Fiction: Hawkes, Pynchon, And Irving; Understanding John Updike's Fiction

Donald J. Greiner, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina is the lecturer for both of these programs from the Eminent Scholar/Teachers: Contemporary American Fiction series. Greiner, while not the most exuberant of lecturers is, nevertheless, knowledgeable and enlightening about his subjects. In Postmodernist Fiction, Greiner first seeks to come to some definition of the term which is generally used to characterize post-WWII fiction which takes a slightly absurdist approach to a modern world in which belief systems no longer support once held universal truths. Greiner examines John Hawkes' Second Skin, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and John Irving's The World According to Garp. Irving is a strange choice to include in the postmodernist fold, and Greiner admits as much. His argument that the protagonist T.S. Garp's book excerpts included in the novel are examples of postmodernist fiction cannot be denied. But Greiner overlooks the obvious: Irving, taking a cue from John Gardner's October Light, incorporates postmodernist fiction in order to critique it. Garp's life is a much more interesting novel than anything he writes--unable to cope with the vagaries of modern life, Garp writes what I would call "art, without heart." Looking at the two latest books by Pynchon and Irving, Vineland and A Prayer for Owen Meany, respectively, the differences are even clearer. Vineland is a novel of technical virtuosity and verbal brilliance rendered in the service of pure silliness (art, without heart). Irving, who does not possess Pynchon's superior command of the language, nevertheless delivers a powerful tale in A Prayer for Owen Meany, which contains fabulist elements to be sure, but is firmly grounded in plot and character development of 19th-century fiction (the Novel's "golden period"). Lit crit students would find this interesting (and arguable), but it's unlikely to appeal to general readers. Understanding John Updike's Fiction is a better tape with a surer sense of focus. Greiner, rightly I think, acknowledges Updike as America's leading writer, and after a brief exposition of his biography, zeroes in on a survey of the Updike opus. Considerable attention is spent on Rabbit Run, The Centaur, and the Hawthornian trilogy of novels (A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version, and S.) which offer Updike's modern gloss on The Scarlet Letter. But the chief attribute of Greiner's talk is his discussion of Updike's examination of the tension between religious faith and physical desire (a theme which has become more pronounced in later novels). Along with art, Updike has played these three themes throughout his career on a wide variety of characters drawn, one might say, from the "lifestyles of the middle-class and rather ordinary." This program would be suitable for college libraries, and possibly for public libraries with larger literary criticism collections. (See FEUDING AND LOVING IN SHAKESPEARE'S "ROMEO AND JULIET" for availability.)