postwar American authors: recommendations?

Also, to risk the ire of Our Northern Neighbors, would you consider Canada to be part of the US?

Also, does postwar simply designate a timeframe in this case?

chris, sorry i don't know what you mean...

start with Appointment in Samarra or Butterfield 8 before you tackle his longer, later epics from the 50s.

actually, he was just as much pre as well as post WW2.

From Here To Eternity by James Jones is a good novel about "the war" though it's improved by seeing the movie first.

Tobias Wolff is one of my favourite writers - he's more post-Vietnam and bloody fantastic. This Boy's Life is my favourite (it's a memoir) - all the rest of his stuff is short fiction.

Also you might like Tim O'Brien.

And from what I recall of the first-person plural short, sort of the omniscient unreliable narrator was so wrapped up in its tacit point-making that the style tried my patience.

It's been a long time since I've read anything of his, so I can't be terribly precise; but I know that lots of people love him, and lots of people hate him.

John Updike: the Rabbit novels
Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift
Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, I Married a Communist
Richard Yates: Easter Parade, Revolutionary Road, The Complete Stories
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, Suttree, Child of God, The Road
Charles Portis: Masters of Atlantis, Norwood, Dog of the South
Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son

Also: you're supposed to hate Rabbit.

also stuff like mark leyner, douglas coupland, is kind of a particular & necessary snapshot of a certain period. although that's post-gulf war even. at some point "postwar" is going to be a useless classification for american fiction.

foster wallace has a marvellous takedown of updike in his last collection. well, not marvellous. but impressively snide, once you get to the punchline. in u &i n baker (who might go with that duo, above) mentions updike's comparison of the inside of a vagina to a ballet slipper. i always wondered what john updike was doing fucking the ballet slipper.

He is clumsy with his feet.

If we're bring up experimetal stuff (esp. poetry and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement) then check out Charles Bernstein (the essays in Content's Dream & My Way and the poetry in the Sophist), Bob Perelman (my teacher, totally cool guy), Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews (prepare to be offended) and a bunch of other folk--Michael Palmer (not the medical thriller writer) and Ron Siliman amongst them.

Am I supposed to be the ILB troll?

-- Casuistry (chri...), October 4th, 2006.

This is troll.

Sterling, and everyone else, here's the takedown

http://www.ptwi.com/~bobkat/observer1.html

Everyone leaves Danielle Steele off these lists because she's a hack.

Well but yes. I mean if you take an 18th C English fiction course and they include Tristram Shandy then this seems questionable -- Tristram Shandy is, as far as I know, an exception, and reading it -- while awesome -- gives you very little sense of what 18th C English fiction was like! The literary history that we're given is an exceptionalist one, which makes for good reading but bad history.

I haven't read the Roth, but I'm pretty sure if I did I could make a case for it being about Vietnam (by which I don't just mean the war itself but also its effects on the US and the changes in culture that it brought about). That may or may not be the most interesting way to read that book, of course.

My Danielle Steele case, such as it is, is that if you want to understand something about a culture in a time period, it makes more sense to pay attention to the "popular mainstream hacks" than to the relatively unpopular idiosyncratic literary geniuses. Although really my point was that the list was blandly homogenous, and I wanted to think up someone who fit the description but would never be mentioned here. It was either Steele or Iceberg Slim, who I also haven't read.

if danielle steele or anyone else doesn't make for much of a contribution on the 'importantly registering reaction to the times' angle, does anything she wrote constitute an actual development in or at least change in fashion of a mass genre? that seems like a more fruitful way of pushing this line of argument.

Also, you should have picked Iceberg Slim.

I've not read Peyton Place, but I'll rep for Valley of the Dolls as a well-written, popular description of its era. Nelson Algren's major novels are better written and even more descriptive of their era, from my remote romantic viewpoint.

And, OK, Tristram Shandy is a somewhat complicated example. It was something of a surprise hit.

mike, i have just bought Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, it is patiently waiting on my bookshelf.

tom, i am quite a Douglas Coupland fan, have read most of his books. they have dated but provide quite funny cultural observations and i found them intelligent and also very easy reading. some of his endings are pretty shoddy though.