After a long depression, making believe is paying off
In America, fiction is always in trouble. The novel has been receiving extreme unction for 20 years, the short story is the waif of literature, perennially searching for a home. Yet this fall, scores of worthy novels have issued from distinguished publishers; stories still find a loyal readership. Random House Editorial Director Jason Epstein notes that James Michener's novel Chesapeake is selling twice as well as his last one. A first novel, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, has sold 40,000 copies. Says Epstein: The outlook for U.S. fiction has "never been better. "
Richard Snyder, president of Simon & Schuster, agrees: "Anyone who decries the state of fiction is naive. It used to be that the maximum you could hope to sell in quality work was about 100,000 copies. That figure has doubled in recent years. "
Herman Gollob, editor in chief of Atheneum, admits that "there is one kind of fiction that is disappearing — the non-friction novel that gives off no sparks, that is selfconscious, competent, tedious. But the rest of the list has unprecedented vitality and variety. If you can get Judith Krantz's Scruples and John Irving's The World According to Garp on the same bestseller list, you have a thriving democratic literature. " It is a literature that will always experience depressions as well as rallies. But for now, most publishers of novels and stories are bullish on fiction. As this autumn gathering proves, they have at least 11 good reasons:
ADJACENT LIVES by Ellen Schwamm Knopf; 215 pages; $7.95
A distinguished art critic, Tom is weary of his marriage to his promiscuous, desperately chic wife, and finds in his beautiful student a kind of Beatrice to his Dante. Although she is happily married, Natalie is immediately attracted to her professor's radiance of mind. He pursues her, she capitulates only too willingly, and they begin a year-long series of passionate, clandestine meetings. In her first novel, Ellen Schwamm takes this conventional plot and Manhattan milieu and creates a fresh and elegant narrative.
As Natalie endures two deaths in the family and Tom tries to come to terms with his wife's infidelities, their affair frays and then severs. Though the doomed lovers are portrayed with grace and wit, the novel's style is curiously oblique, conveying intensity of feeling not so much by exposition as by choice of detail and inflection.
"Even her passion has poise," Schwamm writes of Natalie. The same may be said of Schwamm's minor-key prose, remarkably suited to evoking those "moments of clear, bright, sufficient joy" that elevate life and redeem grief.
A KINGDOM by James Hanley Horizon; 201 pages; $8.95
The Welsh novels of James Hanley are peopled by a nation of poets. An old man recites a story in a pub and "the sun came out of his mouth"; the storyteller's auditor reports to his wife: "That Roberts man broke open his tight mouth and warmed the whole place with a tale."