[kennyc]

Some might think so...

From Steinbeck to Steampunk: The Day the American Novel Died
Part of: There, I Said It!

Author: John H. Byk — Published: May 11, 2012 at 1:11 am 0 comments
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“Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event--the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.” –John Irving from The Fourth Hand.

Is the Golden Age of American Literature dead? The above quote is from the opening line of John Irving’s novel published in 2001. We all know what happened in September of that year and I can’t help but think that more than just the World Trade Center, along with America’s sense of national security, collapsed.

I found The Fourth Hand today in a second-hand store and immediately was drawn into it and had to buy it. I had read several of Irving’s novels earlier in my life and always came away from them with a sense of my life somehow being changed, embellished, and fascinating. Many of his contemporaries in the late 20th century also had the same effect upon me as a reader when I was studying for my Masters of Art in English, such as Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Ken Kesey, Paul Theroux and others just to name a few. But when I pick up a so-called best seller these days, I don’t find the same kind of compelling prose, meaningful narrative, and provocative insights into the complexities of the human experience that I used to cherish.

Instead, I usually unsatisfactorily discover banality, sensationalism, or superficiality that reflects, in my opinion, a generation of writers that grew up on MTV, vampires, zombies or tiresome, post-apocalyptic themes that do little to mirror life through art as I believe, and was taught, that excellent literature should do. What has gone wrong with this picture (or this book to be more precise)? Have serious authors retreated, along with the rest of American society in general, into a shell of self-denial, and sold out completely to the bottom line or is there nothing left to honestly say about our culture anymore?

Golden Ages of literature come and go. This is a historical fact. England had its with authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and similar writers. In fact, England has had more than one Golden Age if you want to go as far back to the times of Shakespeare and Chaucer.

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Rest is here:
http://blogcritics.org/books/article...mpunk-the-day/