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Ellison has written only one novel, The Invisible Man, a sourly brilliant odyssey of a Negro who wanders from the Deep South to deeper Harlem and the Communist Party. It is a long, difficult work, about which it is enough to say that it is the only novel yet written, except for Finnegans Wake, that successfully extends the nightmare techniques Joyce developed in Ulysses. Currently writer-in-residence at Rutgers University, Ellison is well into a new, untitled novel, on which he has been working for six years. "I'm a slow writer." he said recently. "Some days I don't even finish a page, and often that's no good. But I'm not depressed about it. I like what I've done, mainly."
Bernard Malamud dances a fine step on the wavy line between myth and mundanity. The baseball-playing demigod who clubs immemorial home runs in The Natural is almost a part of the real world; the faltering drifter of The Assistant, who pumps life into the impoverished Jewish grocer he has robbed, is almost not a part of it. In each case, Malamud has subtly shifted reality, as a dream peddler must, to suit the thread of his dream. What is remarkable is that the author's magical illusions are accomplished without stylistic props; his tales are simply and clearly told. They are humorous, sad and wise, and unlike the work of any other writer. His last novel, A New Life, the account of a hapless Manhattan teacher's exile at a cow college in the Northwest, carried Malamud's alternation of farce and sadness farther over the line into the real world. In prospect for Malamud readers: a new book of short stories (his first was The Magic Barrel) and a play.
These ten novelists are not isolated. Pressing close upon them in potential talent, if not yet in accomplishment, are another half-dozen or more writers of promise, notably Richard Dougherty (Duggan); Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird); Richard Bankowsky (The Glass Rose) ; James Purdy (The Nephew); William Gaddis (The Recognitions).
The new novelists do not make up anything that could be called an American school. Writing in the U.S. has always been an occupation of lone authors going their own ways. But two generalizations can be made. For one, these writers all exhibit a consistently high quality of style; they occasionally produce bad books, but almost never bad writing. The newer American novelists have not only read and honored Joyce, Proust, Freud and Hemingway; they have recovered from the experience. They have even, most of them, recovered from Faulkner. Their ways of writing prose are their own.
Secondly, the most successful novels from these writers are, with some exceptions, quite limited in the breadth, although not in the depth, of what is written about. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is the modern archetype of this kind of book, a brilliant and intense vision of a very few compass degrees of experience. No one has been really successful with a broad, full-compass attack of what it is like to be alive in the 1950s and '60s. Few of the new novelists have tried.