A large part of the reason for the continuing democratic vigour of the American novel is that the great wave of Modernism was no more than a ripple by the time it reached New England's shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself - as, indeed, it still is - and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb 'to forge'. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist?

LRB 4 October 2007 | PDF Download