The art of any particular society and...

The art of any particular society and period plays itself out in a framework of furious questioning, equivalent, perhaps, to the fields of physics. (Magnetism, for example, is conceivable only in terms of a magnetic field--an order of reality disposed to permit it. Gravity requires a gravitational field. It sounds tautological, but it seems to make sense to the cosmologists.) The field upon which an art flourishes or flounders consists of the major doubting that goes on--among critics, of course, but also among the artists themselves--as to whether that art is possible, healthy, ill, dead or on the verge of drastic make-over. Take, for example, the questions perpetually raised about the state of American fiction. They are questions I face from time to time as the house fiction reviewer, one who regularly delivers opinions on 70 or 80 novels and story collections each year. I put them off as much as possible. The more I read, it seems, the less I know.

It is my job, and also my temperament, mainly to see not forests but trees. As with a carpenter out to make a chair--in this case, a review, which, I suppose, provides some people with a sedentary perch for not reading the book--the reviewer is not necessarily out to contemplate the arboreal whole but to locate and consider a particular bit of wood.

That, after all, is the nearest thing to the experience of the individual passionate reader. Unless we are academic theorists or journalistic trend-spotters, we read book by book or author by author--not school, wave or mini-generation by school, wave or mini-generation. Still, like spring cleaning, a periodic generalization is useful. It lets you know what you’ve got and where it goes. Best of all, a day or two after everything is in order, confusion can be counted on to reassert itself.

So, to begin with conclusions. They are two and they contradict. There is no such thing as American fiction. There is an astonishing amount of American fiction that is first-rate, and sometimes “first-rate” is inadequate. It culminates not in a summit but in an archipelago; it is not a school of fish but an aquarium in which unrelated prodigies swim behind the same glass.

I cannot keep the chair-maker down. I will go not by deductive theorizing but by inductive experiment. The other day, without research or rereading, other than running down the list of the books I reviewed over the last five years, I scribbled offhandedly the names of 57 writers. They were a list not of those I had once praised but those for whom my impulse to praise remains spontaneously alive. The recollection of their book or books or, more usually, one or two of their books, still raises a shiver.

Hard to define, that shiver. Put it as the discovery of a place one has never been and then, having been there, the sense that the world’s shape and possibilities have in some large or small way altered or grown. A story may do that, or a character, though always and only--and sometimes without story or character--by the incandescence of sentences upon a page.

Using the shiver test, my personal shiver, I admit that three or four names are ringers. I do not respond to the work of William Gass; nor to anything Norman Mailer has written in the last 20 years; nor Joyce Carol Oates’ books apart from the remarkable “Black Water,” a kind of ballad suggestive of the dark Chappaquiddick tragedy. The point of these non-shivers is to set up a range of serious American fiction of the second half of the century. I draw on one solitary sensibility, but it would be foolish to exclude a few major figures toward whom, for all I know, I have an incurable blind spot.

Having established a minimally plausible if entirely debatable list of names, the next step was to group them for generalizing purposes. It was easy to pick out our powerful but finely tuned realists--Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth--with their brilliant portraits of the physical, psychological, sensual, social and hallucinatory lives of particular American classes. A seemingly quieter--only seemingly--depiction of middle-class families and marriages is found in the art of Anne Tyler and, on an incipient scale, of Alice McDermott.

All of them, male and female, perfect the irrational and sometimes unhinging human comedy that eats its way beneath the social fabric without quite destroying it. Destruction would remove the tension, as it does with some of our newer writers.

There are the metafictional innovators of the ‘60s and the ‘70s, who write in varying proportions of the surreal, the absurd and the paranoid. Wit infests them like joy. There are the scintillating syncopations of emotion and language of the late Donald Barthelme, and the small, perfect madnesses of the late Stanley Elkin, whose characters try to lead reasonable lives only to be abducted by an internal strain of extraterrestrials.

There are the balefully comic transformations of Robert Coover and the big, hyper-real novels of disquiet by William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. Finally, there is the towering figure of Thomas Pynchon, whose mega-novel “Mason and Dixon” resurrects the tragedy in history with fireworks as dazzling as those he used earlier--in “Gravity’s Rainbow”--to inter the tragedy beneath a steel grid of universal helplessness. He may be the one major American novelist capable of an entire second act.

These precursors bred children--younger writers influenced in varying proportions by Pynchon, Barthelme and Coover. There is a mixture of metafictional pyrotechnics and real engagement in Jonathan Franzen: for instance, Rick Moody, the early William Vollman and the dazzling Stephen Wright. There is also David Foster Wallace, whose “Infinite Jest” outdoes Pynchon in size and brag, though not in savor or depth. There is a gigantism in some of the newer writers--Vollman shows recent signs of it--and, at times, the reader may wonder whether their real subject is their computers.

Other writers seek in American life a more traditional male or male-female form of drama. Actions have consequences in the novels and stories of Robert Stone, Andre Dubus, Russell Banks, Frederick Busch and Tobias Wolff. They range from Dubus’ and Stone’s brutal epiphanies to the more complex and, at their best, grace-tinged moralities of Banks, Wolff and Busch.

There are the big, primal myth writers with lashings of legend and magic: Mark Helprin and Cormac McCarthy. There are a few writers who have made luminous efforts to join fiction and modern science: Richard Powers with “Galatea II” and Louis Jones with the comically touching “Particles and Luck.” There are the haiku-like allegories on the theory of relativity in Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams.”

“Ethnic writers” is a repellent term whose convenience quickly gives way to absurdity. Toni Morrison, who more than any other American novelist has made the power of magic realism her own, won the Nobel Prize, presumably transforming the Norwegian Academy into an ethnic lobby. Morrison, Gloria Naylor and John Edgar Wideman have found in American history a fiery furnace, which, when attempted by white writers, tends to come out as central heating with a jumpy thermostat. This is true even when the adjustments are managed as finely as in Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies.”

American writers from the Caribbean--Edwidge Danticat from Haiti, Cristina Garcia from Cuba and Jamaica Kincaid from Antigua--prod us toward another kind of universal magic, as they test our reality with voices that modify our notion of what an American voice may be. So do such exceptional writers as Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston and Fae Myenne Ng.

These various clusters and others sit demurely on my page for a moment or two. Then, like banquet guests unhappy with their seats, the names table-hop. I try to draw lines. Joan Didion’s fine-edged political disquiet crosses over to encounter Stone’s muscular denunciations; up out of the magic myths of “Fiskadoro” come Denis Johnson’s Central American nightmares to join them. Morrison’s brilliant Job-like rants find themselves face to face suddenly, startlingly, with Roth’s.

Louis Jones’ errant physicist awakes outdoors at 3 a.m. in a wicked fugue state with Anne Tyler’s fleeing housewife. Tyler herself discloses, beneath her domestic plights, a comic magical extremity that would not be entirely out of place in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo.

Jayne Anne Phillips who, with Jane Hamilton and Jane Smiley, writes with fierce lyrical realism about women’s pain, navigates briefly near the macho Faulknerian legendry of Cormac McCarthy. On and on, past the solitary unclassifiables. Among them is the incantatory Marianne Wiggins, who, at her best in “John Dollar” and “Herself In Love,” goes beyond magical to sheer demonic possession. There is the angelic Howard Norman (“Northern Lights,” “The Bird Artist”), in whose remarkable characters--as if by prodigious miniaturization--the mythical turns pocket-sized, intimate and funny.

My lines proliferate and tangle. My page is a scrawled palimpsest. My categories are the webs of six drunk spiders at a dance. There is not an American fiction, unless perhaps it is the American itch to define one. (I don’t believe the British, French or Italians scratch as hard.) Perhaps there was one when Hawthorne and Melville were uneasy buddies; when Henry James, in rare unguarded moments, betrayed a wry American twang oddly resembling Mark Twain’s; or when Maxwell Perkins dangled Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe from one editorial wrist. Today, we are too various and too partitioned to meet at any common ground other than the bargain-basement denominator of commercial hype.

And in the bookstore. Because while there is not an American fiction, there is American fiction. Lacking, as a rule, a sense of transcendence (the new Pynchon is an exception) and consequently unable to fuse life with its shape and arc (we tend to get all-life realism or all-shape metafiction), it is searching and varied.

If it is a fractured mirror, it is the true mirror of a fractured society and a divided national consciousness. It is not the passive “mirror traveling down a road” of the 19th century impressionists. It is the active mirror, the many active mirrors, demanding of their corner of reality--white, brown, black, the privileged and the shut-out, the self-alienated and the nationally denied, the absurdist overfed and the absurdly hungry: Make the road.