The worst writers of their generation: a second look

I am little baffled as to how Charles Foran could write a whole essay about a whole generation of consumer-society-obsessed American novelists (D.F. Wallace, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, Lethem, etc.) and not mention either Don Delillo, who did all of it before and continues to do it, with arguably diminishing returns, or Dave Eggers, who has – like a millionaire stockbroker who has a heart attack and becomes a Buddhist – seemingly broken through all that literary white noise to some self-consciously tranquil place of clarity and love. (Maybe for the worse.)

Foran also, astonishingly, makes no mention of critic James Wood, who covered all this fairly exhaustively, most notably in a series of review essays on people like Franzen, Delillo, and Zadie Smith. (Remember "hysterical realism?")

I'm also not certain what Foran's point is here. That the work of American writers who were all the rage seven or eight years ago is not aging well? That Infinite Jest was maybe a little hollow? Knock me over with a feather. And what's with that shoehorned-in bit about Canadian writers? ("There may even be a link between the impulse to remain oblivious to the textures of material existences north of the forty-ninth parallel and the tendency in Canadian novels to steer clear of formal crisis. Keep the messiness at bay and you can keep the stories tidy.") It's not as though I disagree – Canadian books that "remain oblivious to the textures of material existences" are the windmills I most often choose to tilt at – but it feels like a non-sequitur as it is. The rest of his essay argues that these American writers have come to an imaginative dead-end.

Perhaps Foran is suggesting that, even if it leads nowhere, the frantic chase after some illusory vision of the world is at least better than most of what we get up here, which is more like the preemptive renunciation of such a chase. I wish his whole essay was about that.


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