What a difference a decade makes. Mediagenic writers like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s. But those authors have now faded into their own material, symbols of the superficialities they exploited in their fiction.
Why? One explanation is that literature is no more immune to changing fashions than any other form of entertainment. Novels that reflect only the glittering moment usually turn out to be artifacts, not art. Another reason is that literary fiction of the past two decades, good at dramatizing personal crises, has rarely attempted to engage the tumult of the wider world. Social disorder is handled more efficiently in nonfiction, journalism or seductively moving images. Who needs to plow through an imaginative verbal construct when the content is available in more accessible forms?
Fiction writer Jonathan Franzen faced that fact last year in a long, fretful article in Harper's magazine. "The novelist," he wrote, "has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"
But Franzen's gloomy observation has not deflected him or three other gifted writers of his acquaintance: Donald Antrim, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, last year's young literary comet. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names.
Wallace's wit and funky erudition encores this year in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown; 353 pages; $23.95), a collection of essays and highly personalized journalism. Writing about subjects as unrelated as tennis, Dostoyevsky and Caribbean cruise ships, Wallace again demonstrates powers of split-screen vision and information processing that should be measured in megabytes rather than IQ points.
Franzen and the others may benefit from Wallace's success. The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen's deft social-science fiction about a former Bombay police chief who plots to take over St. Louis, Missouri, first published in 1988, was recently released in paperback (Noonday Press; 517 pages; $15).
Franzen displays a striking talent for turning an implausible plot into a convincing omen. Middle-class flight, a shriveled tax base and the usual urban rumpuses encourage St. Louis authorities to hire S. Jammu, a woman related to Indira Gandhi, to run its police department. Soon Jammu and her imported Indian co-conspirators launch a power grab that includes Orwellian public relations, kidnappings and pet assassinations. Franzen's twisty plot and thriller pace are the sweeteners that mask his caustic commentary on urban decline.