(2 of 3)
Donald Antrim's recently published novel, The Hundred Brothers (Crown; 206 pages; $21), is a family fantasy that capers between atavistic ritual and inspired slapstick. Antrim delivers a nightmare version of a clan reunion as his sibling horde gathers to search for their father's ashes and abuse one another. The brothers, nearly all eccentric if not insane, include a giant, a compulsive whisperer, an expert in the sexual language of insects, and the narrator, who morphs into a Mesoamerican corn god.
In contrast, Rick Moody's Purple America (Little, Brown; 298 pages; $23.95) lights the road to chaos with creepy realism. Like Wallace, Moody knows it takes an extra tweak of the commonplace to turn diversion into gnawing unease. He opens his story with a son giving his invalid mother a bath. The uncomfortably Oedipal theme is underscored by a prose style as ominous as a Greek chorus: "Whosoever knows the folds and complexities of his own mother's body, he shall never die. Whosoever knows the latitudes of his mother's body, whosoever has taken her into his arms and immersed her baptismally in the first-floor tub..."; the forbidding litany builds for four more pages.
Purple America is essentially about our fateful relationship with Mother Earth. The nuclear power plant in Moody's fictional Connecticut town is leaking radioactive waste into Long Island Sound. The contrast between the old woman's wasting nerve disease and the aging utility's malfunctioning plumbing is resonant without being unduly obvious. Moody's sentences may occasionally run too hot, and his radioactive menace is a bit familiar. But Purple America's characters are emotionally intricate, and its tensions adroitly controlled.
To one degree or another, each member in this prodigiously talented quartet has attachments to earlier purveyors of black humor, like William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon (whose new novel, Mason & Dixon, will be published later this month). But beyond sharing some literary influences, the younger apocalyptic foursome do not hype themselves as part of a new literary movement. "I think we're all white males between 30 and 40, as far as I know" is how Wallace coyly describes the group. Yet the mutual affinities of these writers are real and nearly as complex as their antic plots.
All are graduates of elite Eastern colleges. Moody and Antrim were friends at Brown. Wallace concentrated on philosophy and English literature at Amherst, while Franzen majored in German at Swarthmore. The latter two became close after Wallace wrote a Franzen fan letter about the time Franzen met Moody, who was then an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which first published The Twenty-Seventh City. What's more, Antrim and Franzen visit regularly for what the latter calls "anguished conversation," and Wallace and Moody have the same editor at Little, Brown.
But more important, these men share a serious like-mindedness. Wallace adds some critical mass to the kinship in his new essay collection. "The next real literary 'rebels' in this country," he writes, "might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching...who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."