THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MEN
The first few decades after World War II brought forth a handful of younger American writers whom the literary establishment – book critics, publishing industry insiders, the mainstream media – were eager to label as the next big thing in American literature. Fitzgerald was dead, Hemingway and Faulkner were washed up, and Steinbeck was no longer at his peak. The handsome young men of the so-called Lost Generation were now old and crotchety (or deceased) and just not as much fun as they used to be. The publishing industry needed some new stars. As Paul Simon sings, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” and American literature’s star-making machinery was working at full force. By the 1970s, a handful of, mostly, middle-aged white guys had been more or less anointed America’s Most Important Writers of Serious Literature. That doesn’t make for a good acronym along the lines of Wendy Cope’s TUMPs (Typically Useless Male Poets), so how about Frequently Over-Rated Men of American Literature, or FORMALs. Foremost among these FORMALs were Norman Mailer, John Updike, William Styron, John Barth, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, and John Cheever. Others who were sometimes included in this bunch were Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin. In 1975, if you had asked an educated New York Times subscriber which contemporary American writers were likely to still be read fifty years from now, he or she would probably have listed at least a few of the FORMALs. Those fifty years have pretty much passed. And now we can look back and see how well these literary titans of old have fared in the years since their heyday. In my opinion, time has not been particularly friendly to most of the FORMALs and their work. These days they look less like literary titans and more like the hero of the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man. I say this not in glee but merely as an observation about the difficulty of predicting how future generations will look at the literature of the past.
I read many of the FORMALs’s books with enjoyment. I was particularly a fan of E.L. Doctorow. Ragtime blew my mind when I first read it in the 1970s. I went back and read Doctorow’s earlier novel The Book of Daniel, and then I began reading each new Doctorow novel as it was published. My wife and I once drove from Sacramento to San Francisco to hear Doctorow speak. He was a writer whom I would have bet on to be even more celebrated in 2024 than in 1975. Alas, that really isn’t the case. And it isn’t entirely Doctorow’s fault. He may not have been as great as I thought he was back in the 70s, but he did make an effort to inject seriousness and good writing into subjects that were most often tackled by writers of pop fiction: gangsters, crime, the Old West, weird science, and so forth. Doctorow’s work is all still in print (except the early novel Big As Life, which Doctorow withdrew from publication himself). He still has fans and devoted readers. But he certainly hasn’t attained anywhere near the status of an F. Scott Fitzgerald or an Ernest Hemingway. I believe he was a better novelist than Fitzgerald but that doesn’t matter much. Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age in such a way that he has been permanently enshrined as its official chronicler. Doctorow’s sin may have been his versatility. He could write well about a lot of different eras and a lot of different types of people. But no one could credit him with having captured the 1970s in a single book the way that some critics seem to think that Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby. Doctorow was a very good American novelist. Perhaps some future generation of Americans will find something in his work that will inspire them to elevate it to the highest levels of the American literary canon, alongside Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Twain. But I don’t think so. I doubt that Doctorow himself believed that he would be elevated to literary superstardom after his death. He wrote a lot of very good American novels but he never seemed obsessed with writing The Great American Novel. Perhaps his ambitions were a bit too modest. I predict that, like Edwin O’Connor, whose literary novels The Last Hurrah and The Edge of Sadness were among the ten bestselling novels of 1956 and 1961, respectively, and who won a Pulitzer for the latter, Doctorow won’t ever again be as popular as he was during his heyday. He is one of the incredible shrinking men of post-war American fiction, and I don’t think anything can reverse that process.
No one could ever accuse Norman Mailer of having modest ambitions. If anything, his ambitions were far too grand. Each time he wrote a book he seemed to be trying to grab himself a seat between Hemingway and Dos Passos in the Pantheon of Great American Authors. He was an immensely talented writer, and he had the stamina to write great amounts of fiction and nonfiction. But rarely were the results of his efforts as great as he seemed to think they were. Like many avid American readers, I read his 1979 “non-fiction novel” The Executioner’s Song when it was still relatively hot off the presses and thought it was brilliant. It struck me as a towering achievement in American literature. I have never reread the book, so I don’t know if I would still be as awed by it as I was back in 1980 when I read it. But I’m willing to believe that I, and all the others who admired that book back in the day, were correct in believing it to be, if not The Great American Novel, at least a great American novel, with the emphasis on “American.” It genuinely seemed to capture the violence and rootlessness that were corroding great swaths of the American working class of the time and would go on doing so in decades to come. Mailer may not have coined the phrase “deaths of despair” but he certainly described what lives of despair looked like in mid-century America. The next book I read by Mailer was 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and I thought it was a brilliant piece of pulp fiction, the kind of novel that Jim Thompson might have written had he been a bit more of an intellectual. Alas, after that, I never again found a Mailer novel to my liking. I read Deer Park and hated it, as did almost every critic who reviewed it. I attempted to read both Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost but ran out of patience somewhere around the middle of each. I read Of a Fire on the Moon but didn’t find it anywhere near as engaging as Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, which dealt with a similar subject matter. Why Are We In Vietnam? was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, but relatively few critics would agree with that assessment any longer. Well before it reached its twentieth birthday, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was widely regarded as an American masterpiece, and time doesn’t appear to have dimmed that assessment, nor should it. But Why Are We In Vietnam? seems unlikely to ever again be hailed as essential reading. Mailer spent much of his career and millions of words writing about the banality of evil in the twentieth-century. He wrote several big books about relatively unimpressive men who committed acts of great evil. The best of these, of course, is The Executioner’s Song, which runs to 1,136 pages. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery is another sort of nonfiction novel that explores, in 864 pages, the life of JFK’s assassin. Oddly, his 2007 novel, The Castle in the Forest, tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s childhood and young manhood in a mere 465 pages, but it was published in the year of Mailer’s death and he may have been running out of stamina at the time. It is no crime for a writer not to write a masterpiece on the order of The Sun Also Rises. But Norman Mailer was no ordinary writer. He announced his ambitions early and often. And Hemingway was clearly the one author whom he most wanted to surpass. He spoke admiringly of Hemingway and dismissively of Hemingway but he could never seem to stop talking or thinking about the man. And I believe that most contemporary critics would probably agree that, Mailer, though immensely talented, fell far short of equaling what Papa Hemingway accomplished in his writing career. For one thing, Hemingway practically invented the twentieth-century American short story. His stories influenced not just other literary authors but important pulp fiction writers such as Hammett and Bradbury and Heinlein. Mailer pretty much eschewed the short story entirely, and it is easy to see why. He was a voluminous writer, a man who loved to spew out great geysers of words. And by 1950, the overriding ambition of nearly every serious fiction writer in America was to write an epic novel on the scale of Moby Dick or The House of the Seven Gables or, at the very least, The Adventures of Huck Finn. Mailer seems to have spent much of his writing life aiming at producing one of these leviathans. The closest he got, as far as I can see, was The Executioner’s Song. But it doesn’t really wear the mantle of novel comfortably. It is a work of reportage and a work of literature and a work of storytelling and a work of history, but it isn’t quite a novel.
Mailer is in no immediate jeopardy of becoming as forgotten as such once highly regarded American writers as Booth Tarkington or James Gould Cozzens. There is a Norman Mailer Society dedicated to preserving his legacy (of course, when your fans feel the need to form a society to preserve your work, it may be because they suspect it is on the way to being forgotten). Some of his best work has been enshrined in the volumes of the Library of America. He produced so much work in so many different genres of literature that scholars are likely to be debating and writing about his legacy for a long time to come. But the common readers of the future are unlikely to be as familiar with his name and his works as contemporary common readers are of books like Huck Finn and A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby. Literary immortality depends upon more than just skill or artistry. Plenty of people might argue that, say, Edgar Allan Poe was a hack, but much of Poe’s work is nonetheless immortal (Doctorow, who was named after him, thought Poe was America’s “greatest bad writer.”). In 2023, Netflix gave its viewers The Fall of the House of Usher, a streaming series that combined elements from many of Poe’s works. Mike Flanagan, the creator of the series, knew that he could reference writings such as The Raven and The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado and that millions of viewers would be able to recognize them. Part of the fun of watching the series came from simply trying to identify the many allusions to Poe’s work. Millions of viewers could play that game. But a similar series based on the writings of Norman Mailer would likely fail, since relatively few people are intimately familiar with his work. Edgar Allen Poe, for all his faults, managed to write himself into the American psyche. I don’t think that Mailer did. He was better educated than Poe; he lived much longer than Poe; he wrote much more than Poe did; he may even have been smarter and more talented than Poe; but I doubt that his influence on American and world culture will last as long as Poe’s has. I highly suspect that, with time, Mailer’s accomplishments will gradually fade from the cultural memory. This won’t be entirely Mailer’s fault. Some of it may have to do with things largely beyond his control, for instance an effort to shine the spotlight on mid-twentieth century writers who were not white, male Ivy Leaguers. But if I had to sum up what separates writers like Mailer from writers like Poe and Twain and even Hemingway, I would simply say, “Story, story, story.” Ask a relatively well-read American to sum up a work by Poe and they can probably describe at least a half dozen of his poems or short stories well enough to make the summary interesting. The same is true of Twain and Hemingway. The Prince and The Pauper, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Killers – titles like that practically tell the tale by themselves. What’s more, works by Hemingway, Twain, and Poe have proven amenable to adaptation for cinema and television and other media. Literary snobs will tell you that this shouldn’t matter to a fiction writer’s reputation, and perhaps they have a point. But this does matter to a storywriter’s reputation. A good story should be adaptable from one medium to another. It’s difficult to imagine a great film adaptation of the work of John Hawkes or Donald Barthleme or John Barth. Those men wrote tons of fiction but their stories tend to be too diffuse or abstract or non-existent to work in any medium other than that of the printed word. Ask someone to name a Poe character and they might mention Lenore or Roderick Usher or C. Auguste Dupin. Ask them to name a Twain character and they might mention Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. But ask them to name a John Hawkes character and you’re likely to get only a blank stare. Hawkes once famously claimed, (probably the only thing he ever did that became famous), “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” Mailer wasn’t nearly that hostile to the traditional elements of storytelling. But he seemed to have a difficult time producing great plots or memorable characters. His books were big and packed full of fine writing and observations about sex, philosophy, war, sport, manliness, politics, Hollywood, and a thousand other things, but they rarely told the kind of compelling story that can travel by word of mouth from one avid reader to another. Reviewers of his books seem to struggle to summarize them because they resist that kind of reductiveness. This may be a good thing in a writer, an admirable thing, but it isn’t generally the road to posterity unless you are Cervantes or Rabelais or Proust. Mailer liked to portray himself as an outsider, and in some respects he was. He was a Jew in a largely Christian country. But he was also a white male Ivy League graduate who was embraced by the American publishing establishment almost immediately. His nonfiction appeared in many of the most prominent publications of his time. He was, essentially, another wealthy and successful New York businessman no matter how often he tried to pose as something else. Had he embraced his true identity, he might have, like Louis Auchincloss, produced a lot of fine novels criticizing upper-crust American life from the perspective of a member of that tribe. I’m not sure this would have been a good choice for Mailer. He tried it once, with the 1965 novel An American Dream, and the results were decidedly mixed. I believe that Auchincloss is an enormously underappreciated writer of fiction. In a fair world he’d be celebrated as the equal of Edith Wharton and Henry James, his two most obvious literary role models. But he, too, is in the process of being forgotten, and he will probably fade from the literary radar long before Mailer does.
Mailer came along just when TV was insinuating itself in the American home, and Mailer – like Vidal, Capote, William F. Buckley, and a few other writers – had a genius for making himself watchable on the small screen. He was pugnacious and opinionated and never shied away from a provocation. He’s the kind of writer, like Julia Child, whose life is more likely than his writings to inspire film and television adaptations. Auchincloss’s novels are, in general, much more entertaining than Mailer’s. But a film about Auchincloss’s life would likely be the streaming equivalent of chloroform. It might seem a contradiction to label a larger-than-life writer like Mailer an Incredible Shrinking Man, but I think the label fits. His work isn’t ever likely to become a popular subject of college courses, and not just because of how politically incorrect much of it is. It’s fairly easy to teach, say, Hemingway’s work by merely introducing students to a handful of his best stories and a shorter novel, such as The Old Man and the Sea. You could do the same with a few Fitzgerald stories and The Great Gatsby. Both men produced almost all of their best work over the course of about a decade and a half. Both men left behind enough excellent short stories that those alone could provide a reader with an understanding of the writer’s skill and his obsessions. Mailer’s work is spread across six decades and he didn’t leave behind any short works that ably sum up his career and style. I don’t predict oblivion for him any time soon. But he has already begun to shrink, and I don’t expect the process ever to stop.
John Updike had almost all of Mailer’s advantages in life – white, male, Ivy League education, early publishing-industry insider status – with very little of Mailer’s baggage. Updike may well have had an ego as big as Mailer’s but he was much better at keeping it in check. He was temperate and polite and he didn’t seem to crave the spotlight. His writing, like his public and personal lives, was better behaved than Mailer’s. What’s more, unlike Mailer, Updike wrote a great many short stories, and he also produced more conventionally plotted and sized novels, just about one per year for most of his writing life. It would be fairly easy to teach Updike’s fiction to a college class, but I’m not sure what the point would be. Updike seems to be shrinking more rapidly than most of his fellow former literary titans. As with Doctorow and Mailer, this isn’t entirely fair. Updike was not just talented, he worked hard. He wasn’t like, say, Jack Kerouac, a man as famous for his bohemian lifestyle as for his books. If Mailer’s role model was Hemingway, it sometimes seemed as if Updike’s, at least early in his career, was J.D. Salinger. Just as Mailer occasionally felt inclined to put down his idol, Updike at least once very publicly criticized Salinger, claiming that the older writer infused his characters with more tenderness than god himself would have given them. It was a clever line because Salinger’s Seymour Glass had once famously defined sentimentality as giving “to a thing more tenderness than god gives to it.” Updike seems to have regretted it, and years later, when asked by an interviewer for the Michigan Quarterly Review what contemporary writers he was particularly impressed by, he said something about how Salinger’s silence impressed him more than most of what was being written at the time, or words to that effect. Reading it, I got the feeling that Updike had been waiting years for Salinger to publish something – anything – so that Updike could rave about it in print in order to make up for his earlier snottiness towards the older writer. But it never happened. Salinger, like many of The New Yorker’s old guard, appears to have disliked Updike and his work. S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash were both longtime contributors to The New Yorker when Updike first arrived. In 1965, Perelman wrote a letter to Nash in which he described a recent cultural event held in Washington, D.C. ''Also present at this [event],” wrote Perelman, “was that eminence gris, J. O'Hara, and that somewhat younger eminence & literatus, J. Updike. The latter read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I didn't personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page.”
Updike became the New Yorker’s fair-haired boy just as Salinger was retreating into reclusiveness. For a time in the 1950s and early 1960s both Updike and Salinger were publishing in the New Yorker. The publication of each Salinger piece became a literary event of sorts. Updike, not so much. But Salinger was publishing less and less while Updike was publishing more and more. It was inevitable that Updike would eventually become the New Yorker’s new star. But Updike must have known that his stardom was nothing like Salinger’s. Salinger managed to cement his place in the American literary canon with just a single novel, The Catcher in the Rye, nine short stories, and a few assorted novellas. Updike may have thought that he could do the same thing. But over the course of his career he produced novel after novel and short story after short story but never managed to plant anything in the American psyche as firmly as Salinger did The Catcher in the Rye, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, and For Esme With Love and Squalor. What’s more, with his 1959 short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus and his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth seemed to have stepped into the role of Salinger’s literary heir about as much as it was possible to do so. Thus, Updike had to look for other shoes to fill.
Updike is a difficult man to dislike because he worked so hard, produced so much, and he clearly wanted to be liked, wanted to produce the kind of work that, like Salinger’s, created worshipful cults. When it became clear he’d never become the next Salinger, and that the titans of the literary world were now a different breed of Jewish writers – i.e., real novelists like Roth, Heller, Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, etc. (as opposed to Salinger, whose sole novel is pretty much a YA work) – Updike created his own Jewish altar ego, Henry Bech, and inserted him into books that Updike seemed to hope might be as successful as Bellow’s Seize the Day or Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint. But Updike’s non-Jewish status didn’t really help him bring anything to the contemporary Jewish novel that Bellow and the others couldn’t. Mostly, it just looked like an act of impersonation, a clever student’s plea for attention, “Look at me! I wrote a Jewish character!” When Latin American magical realism was all the rage Updike must have eventually gotten sick of hearing so much praise heaped upon the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. We know this because, in 1994, long after the trend had ceased to be trendy, Updike wrote his own book of Latin American realism, a novel called Brazil. This too seemed like a needy but clever student’s cry for more attention. There is nothing really wrong with Bech, A Book; Bech is Back; Bech at Bay; or Brazil. They all display some good writing and they show that Updike is well read and pays attention to writers outside his own immediate WASPy milieu. But unless you’ve read every genuine novel of Latin American magical realism, there isn’t any real reason to read Updike’s Brazil. About the only thing to be gained from reading it (and I did) was an understanding of how well Updike could imitate Latin American magical realism. Updike, an overachieving A student throughout his academic career must have understood that, when it came to writing about American Jews and South American magical realism, he could do no better than B work. Otherwise, why give all those novels titles beginning with that letter? There’s nothing wrong with B work. I could have used a lot more of it when I was a student. But B work isn’t generally the stuff of fiction that lasts and lasts. You could argue, I suppose, that Updike wrote much better sentences than Salinger did. But I don’t believe anything Updike ever wrote will enjoy the posterity of The Catcher in the Rye, and I say that as someone who has never much cared for Holden Caufield (although I love Nine Stories). Life isn’t fair. Some guys grow to be seven-feet tall and can excel on the basketball court without even working that hard at it. Others are born short and can’t reliably make a layup despite hundreds of hours of practice. Salinger was touched with a certain type of literary magic. Updike, in my opinion wasn’t. His work always seems to be trying too hard. I simply can’t read a supposedly erotic description of a woman’s “discreetly but undeniably steatopygous buttocks,” buttocks that possess “enough smugness to declare their cleavage,” without finding both my penis and my will to continue reading shriveling up to near nothingness.
Updike largely panned Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man In Full, although he admired the way that Wolfe tried to write about nonwhite Americans, and particularly black ones. Later, after 9/11, Updike himself tried to get inside the head of a young American Muslim teenager in his 2006 novel, Terrorist. It seemed as if Updike were finally ready to embrace Wolfe’s belief that American novelists needed to get out of their ivory towers and write about the entire panoply of American life. Alas, it was pretty late by this time. Updike was 74 and would be dead in a few years. Terrorist was a noble but somewhat lackluster effort, deserving, perhaps, of a gentleman’s B.
For a while, in the late 1960s, Updike was a bestselling author. It happened almost entirely because his 1968 novel, Couples, was marketed as a torrid tale of sex and adultery. Legions of American readers rushed out to purchase a copy, making the book the second bestselling novel of the year, behind only Arthur Hailey’s Airport. Alas, Updike’s raunchy sex scenes were written with the same dull combination of clinical detail and sesquipedalian cleverness that mars all his other novels, and the American pop-fiction-reading public never again made the mistake of embracing an Updike novel that fervently – or at all, really – again. He went back to being cherished almost exclusively by subscribers to The New Yorker.
Updike always seemed to be a bit behind the times. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a writer. Louis Auchincloss was also behind the times, and proudly so. And plenty of crappy books are written by people who are up on all the latest lingo, sexual practices, and social trends. Updike’s novels won’t fade away as rapidly as, say, Douglas Coupland’s Gen X chronicles, but his literary reputation already seems to be shrinking. It strikes me as unlikely that Updike’s virtues as a writer will outweigh his perceived drawbacks – stodgy white male of privilege – when future American literature syllabi are being written up for college students by their politically correct instructors. He produced a lot of work – novels, stories, reviews, poetry – and very little of it is awful. If I had to bet, I’d say that his essays will live the longest of all his writings. His insight into the works of other authors tend to be more interesting than his fiction or, god help us, his poetry. I doubt that his reputation will diminish to the point where he joins the likes of Booth Tarkington and John P. Marquand among the ranks of Pulitzer Prize winners whom almost nobody ever reads any more. But I also don’t imagine a time when he is elevated to the same status as Edith Wharton or Ernest Hemingway. I have read multiple works by both Tarkington and Marquand. Both men produced some very entertaining books. There is no shame in working hard but not joining the ranks of Wharton and Hemingway. But, as with Mailer, Updike seemed to crave that status, though not quite as openly, so his failure to attain it can justifiably be held against him. If, indeed, he believed himself capable of writing a book as great as The Age of Innocence or The Sun Also Rises, then he surely failed, and he must have recognized this himself. He churned out an amazing array of novels and stories but not one of them really got stuck in the American literary firmament. When I was a high-schooler, we were forced to read his short story “A&P,” which, back in the 70s, was regarded as the equal of Salinger’s For Esme With Love and Squalor or Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants or Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting of Granny Weatherall or Jack London’s To Build a Fire. American high-school textbooks tried to make “A&P” happen but, like “fetch,” it wasn’t destined to be. Updike had the entire apparatus of the mainstream publishing and media worlds behind him and still never managed to make himself as indispensible to American literature as, say, Philip K. Dick did despite his perpetual outsider status. Updike was Richie Cunningham to PKD’s The Fonz. He was the boy you bring home to meet your parents but not the one you turn to when you want a real good time. Updike was the quintessential A student who worked hard and got all his assignments in on time. All he lacked was genius and originality. Let the shrinking begin.
Like Mailer and Updike (both of whom he loathed), Gore Vidal was admirably prolific in a wide variety of literary genres. He wrote teleplays, stage plays, screenplays, novels, nonfiction, and memoir. Even within those genres he was heterogeneous. His novels included golden age mysteries, hardboiled crime stories, historical tales, sex farces, postmodernism, fantasy, and more. His nonfiction includes book reviews, political musings, cultural commentary, travel writing, and more. Like Mailer and Capote (whom he also loathed), Vidal was all over the TV screen in the 1960s and 70s. Like Mailer, he ran for political office several times and always lost. He came from a prominent family. His grandfather was a U.S. Senator. He was a cousin (by marriage) of Louis Auchincloss. He was a pal of John F. Kennedy and a sort of minor member of the whole Kennedy entourage. Like Updike, Mailer, and Capote, he was precociously gifted, displaying a talent for writing at a young age and publishing his first novel at the age of 21. He is believed to have been the model for the character Brinker Hadley in the classic YA novel A Separate Peace, which was written by John Knowles, Vidal’s roommate at Phillips Exeter Academy. He also played roles in several films, most notably Bob Roberts, a 1992 political satire directed by Tim Robbins. In my twenties, I read a lot of his novels: Julian, Messiah, Kalki, Myra Breckinridge, 1876, Creation, Lincoln, and Washington, D.C. He is another of the writers whom my wife and I saw speaking in person at a Bay Area stop on one of his lecture tours. He was witty and intelligent and didn’t seem the slightest bit approachable. He gave off a sort of icy patrician air, even though he never attended university, much less an ivy league one. I enjoyed his novels without ever finding one that I ever truly loved. Nonetheless, I loved the idea of Gore Vidal: a super-successful, pansexual American ex-pat writer living in a fabulous Italian villa and flying back to America regularly in order to flog books on TV shows hosted by the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. You would have thought that all that success and money would have made him happy, but it didn’t seem to. He is said to be the originator of the saying, “It isn’t enough that I succeed, all my friends must fail also.” And, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” I’m not sure he was joking. He clashed quite publicly with a lot of other successful writers of his generation. And his politics seemed to grow more sour and dark as he aged. He went from being an unofficial member of the whole Camelot scene of the early sixties, with its American optimism, to singing the praises of mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh near the end of his life. But his dyspeptic disposition was, apparently, always there. It just grew more visible as he aged. And many of his historical novels, though they showed a deep knowledge of American history, were also often deeply critical of the entire American project. Several of these books, somewhat surprisingly considering their seriousness, were immense bestsellers. Burr was the fifth bestselling novel in America for 1973. His novel 1876 was the sixth bestselling novel in the bicentennial year of 1976. Lincoln: A Novel was the tenth bestseller of 1984.
But Vidal was never one to play the consummate insider the way Updike did. He didn’t publish in the New Yorker. He didn’t attend all the right publishing events and make friends with all the important critics. His lack of an Ivy League education meant that he didn’t have a deep well of old school chums making decisions about literary prizes and honorary degrees. Unlike his cousin Louis Auchincloss, he was not invited to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences immediately after establishing himself as an important American author. He believed the snub was due to his homosexuality and complained about it to Auchincloss. Auchincloss took the complaint to the members of the Academy and Vidal was offered membership. He turned it down. A prideful man who had cut quite a resplendent figure throughout much of his life, he became an obese alcoholic towards the end of his life, according to a remembrance written by for the Washington Post by novelist Michael Mewshaw, who knew him. Vidal almost certainly thought of himself as one of America’s greatest writers, but it seems unlikely that posterity will be so kind. His work will certainly not vanish overnight. Like Updike, his essays and literary criticism comprise probably his most valuable contribution to American letters. Unlike Updike, his best novels – the so-called Narratives of Empire – are highly entertaining. Reading them rarely feel like doing homework, an impressive accomplishment seeing as how they are essentially a lesson in American history.
Vidal’s prominence in the mid-twentieth century literary scene had a lot to do with his own good looks, wit, and willingness to promote himself on TV and elsewhere. His voice was so well known that it was impossible to read his work and not hear it in your head. Future generations probably won’t have that advantage when tackling a Gore Vidal novel. But will future generations even bother to read him? I suspect that people will continue to read his American histories and his essays for at least a few more generations. I doubt that he’ll ever be the subject of numerous college courses, the way that, say, William Faulkner or Toni Morrison are. His books have a much smaller public profile now than they once did. It’s perfectly possible to walk into a well-stocked bookstore and find no novels by Gore Vidal. Although Vidal was very much a part of the pop-cultural scene of the 1960s and 70s, his novels generally had nothing directly to do with that scene or to say about it. He was much more interested in ancient Rome or 19th century America. Myra Breckinridge seemed daring and brilliant in 1968 but it hasn’t aged any better than Why Are We In Vietnam? Gore Vidal seems certain to become just another of American literature’s incredible shrinking men.
Other FORMALs whom I suspect will continue shrinking into obscurity include William Styron, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, William Kennedy, and Robert Penn Warren. Some, such as Vance Bourjaily and Allan Drury and John Hersey already appear to have faded almost completely away. None of these men was a bad writer. Between them they produced quite a few excellent books. But they haven’t seemed to screw their oeuvres to the sticking place.
But the news isn’t all bad. If American literature has plenty of incredible shrinking men (or women), it is also noteworthy for the number of writers it produces whose reputations manage to grow after they are dead and gone. I have already mentioned Philip K. Dick. In the 1970s, few literary snobs would have taken seriously the idea that Dick’s work would someday be enshrined in the Library of America book series. Nonetheless, in 2009, the LoA put out a three-volume set that collects thirteen of Dick’s novels. Likewise, in 2017, the LoA put out a three-volume boxed set of twelve novels written by Elmore Leonard, a pulp-fiction writer who, for much of his career, was completely ignored by the type of critics who heaped lavish praise upon the likes of Updike, Mailer, Vidal, and the like. Fredric Brown, Jim Thompson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ed McBain, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Margaret Millar, Shirley Jackson, and many others who were largely regarded as mere pop-fiction writers back in the mid-twentieth century, have since had their work enshrined in various LoA volumes. Other pop fiction writers have remained relevant simply because the stories they told are too good to be forgotten. Walter Tevis, dead for forty years, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity lately because of a hugely successful Netflix adaptation of his 1983 novel, The Queen’s Gambit. His 1963 novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, was adapted, far less successfully, for a Showtime streaming series in 2022. Mario Puzo never won any major literary awards when he was alive, but his 1969 novel The Godfather proved to be much more influential than anything ever written by Updike or Mailer or Vidal or Doctorow. He and his book were celebrated in the 2022 Paramount + miniseries The Offer. Like Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut was largely dismissed as a writer of pulp sci-fi for much of his career. But, by the late 1960s, he had become a darling of America’s youthful, antiwar set – hippies, college students, etc. – and, before he died, had been admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was hailed as one of American literature’s grand old men. Michael Crichton was never in the running for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, but his work has proven far more influential than anything written by the FORMALs. The Andromeda Strain was one of the plague novels mentioned most frequently during our recent pandemic. Both Vidal (Kalki) and Updike (Toward the End of Time) wrote novels dealing with an apocalypse threatening to wipe out mankind, but few people evoked those books when, during the early days of the pandemic, it looked as thought we might be facing something close to an extinction event. His novel Jurassic Park is 34 years old and remains just as culturally significant as ever. I suspect it will outlive all of John Updike’s novels.
This essay of mine takes its title from a 1957 film called The Incredible Shrinking Man, which was based on The Shrinking Man, a 1956 novel by Richard Matheson. A writer of pulp sci-fi, horror, and fantasy novels (as well as thrillers, westerns, war novels, etc.) Richard Matheson has never been highly regarded by elite critics. He hasn’t enjoyed the posthumous rise in reputation accorded to the likes of Philip K. Dick or Jim Thompson. Nonetheless, his work has entered American culture in a way that feels permanent. Every generation or so we get a new adaptation of his 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Likewise, every decade or so we get new spinoffs of Rod Serling’s iconic 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone, and Matheson was perhaps the best of that series’s contributors. Somewhere in Time, A Stir of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, Real Steel, The Box, The Legend of Hell House – Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of Matheson’s stories. His name has never been all that famous (except among hardcore pop-fiction fans, among whom he is legend), certainly not as famous Updike’s or Mailer’s or Vidal’s, but no fiction written by any of those FORMALs has lodged itself in the American psyche as firmly as I Am Legend has, or his Twilight Zone story “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” or his screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Duel. He was a friend and colleague of Ray Bradbury’s, and though his name isn’t as famous as Bradbury’s, his work is likely to live just as long as Bradbury’s. The same is true of many another pop-fiction writer who toiled away without any serious literary recognition during the heyday of the FORMALs. Jack Finney, who gave us the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, which has been adapted multiple times for the big screen, was never a household name. But his “pod people” have entered the American language and psyche permanently. Likewise Ira Levin and his Stepford Wives, Richard Condon and his Manchurian Candidate, and Grace Metallious and her Peyton Place. Updike never created a character as indelible as Walter Tevis’s Fast Eddie Felson or Charles Portis’s Rooster Cogburn or Elmore Leonard’s Chili Palmer or Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley or Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone or John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs or Ira Levin’s Rosemary Woodhouse or Peter Benchley’s Captain Quint or Stephen King’s Carrie White or any number of other of the characters in American popular fiction who have been fixtures of American culture for decades.
So if you are one of those readers who, like me, can’t understand why today’s educated elites are so excited about the fiction of Colson Whitehead or Jennifer Egan or Viet Thanh Nguyen or Jeffrey Eugenides or Marilynn Robinson or Junot Diaz or Elizabeth Strout or Jonathan Franzen or any of the other mildly interesting novelist who have won high praise and prestigious prizes during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I suggest that you not worry about it too much. Most of those authors have elite educations and are highly connected in the east coast academic and publishing circles that tend to control the reputation-making machinery of what is called “serious American literature.” I highly suspect that, fifty years from now, few will remember anything that was written by the abovementioned literary stars. Writers like Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell and Gillian Flynn and George R.R. Martin and Kristin Hannah and John Green and Delia Owens and Khaled Hosseini and Elin Hilderbrand and Thomas Perry and Thomas Perry and Kim Stanley Robinson and Karen Joy Fowler Bill Pronzini and William Kotzwinkle and Harlan Coben and Andrew Klavan and Jean Hanff Korelitz and dozens of others have a much better chance of still being read decades from now than almost any contemporary Pulitzer Prize winners. What’s more, its almost a dead certainty that a handful of pulp fiction writers who are currently toiling in an obscurity so dark that even I am not aware of their existence will, twenty-five years from now, be as celebrated as Philip K. Dick is today.
In some ways, the contemporary prestige TV miniseries is a better gauge than the Pulitzer Prizes of what constitutes good fiction. Highbrow magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which would probably never deign to review a novel by the likes of Australian pop-fictioneer Liane Moriarty, are generally the first to fawn all over a prestige TV miniseries made from one of her books, such as Big Little Lies. The Atlantic alone published articles about the Big Little Lies miniseries called “How Big Little Lies Captures Children’s Quiet Stress” and “The Problem With That Big Little Lies Courtroom Scene” and “Meryl Streep’s Big Little Lies Matriarch: a Great Villain” and “Big Little Lies Ponders What Makes a Man” and “Big Little Lies and The Work of Marriage” and “Big Little Lies and Incisive Storytelling” and “Big Little Lies and Ziggy’s Powerful Moment” and “Big Little Lies: Sex and Murder in Monterrey” and “Big Little Lies: The American Dream with Muuuuuuuurder” and, well, you get the point. The highbrow critics rush to comment, for better or worse, on prestige miniseries based on books – Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known (source of the HBO miniseries The Undoing), Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, Thomas Perry’s The Old Man, Dan Simmons’s The Terror, Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (source of Netflix’s recent hit Ripley), Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, Stephen King’s Under the Dome, etc. – that they either ignored or panned when they were first published. Iterations of these intellectual properties are likely still be popping up a quarter century from now, when Jennifer Egan’s and Jonathan Franzen’s novels have been largely forgotten.
Not all pop fiction is good and not all literary fiction is bad. But, since at least the end of World War II, the best American popular fiction has been far better than the literary fiction that has been awarded Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, a good proxy for what the snobs consider to be high-quality fiction. When it comes to the horserace of contemporary American fiction, Hollywood and the common reader seem to do a much better job at picking winners than do the committees who hand out prestigious literary prizes. So, go ahead and toss aside that tedious Marilynn Robinson tome and pick up the latest Harry Bosch novel. The snobs may look down their noses at you but, twenty five years from now, I guarantee that they’ll be reading that same Harry Bosch novel, only they’ll be reading it in an expensive Library of America edition and congratulating themselves on their keen understanding of American literature.