With the death of JD Salinger last week, a remarkable era in US literature came to its end. Mark Lawson reflects on the passing of an unrivalled generation
Mark Lawson,The Guardian, Saturday 6 February 2010
January 27 is becoming a black-letter day in American literature. On that day in 2009, John Updike (left) died and, this year, the first anniversary of that loss was marked by the news that JD Salinger was dead. It's an artificial coincidence – of a sort that authors as good as Updike and Salinger would have scorned in their stories – but the deaths in close succession of members of the literary generations born in the 1910s, 20s and 30s do have a symbolic significance. If we add the deaths within four months of 2007 of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut – members with Salinger of the set of major American writers formed by service in the second world war – it's clear that an era in American literature is coming to a close.There is an obvious temptation to believe that the authors who have recently died form – with others who fought in the war (such as Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal) or were teenagers in America during it (Philip Roth) – the greatest literary generation the country has ever seen or ever will see. This triumphalist but nostalgic position holds that these writers took advantage of their nation's geopolitical power – and a media culture and bookstore customer-base which regarded serious writers seriously – to create a superpower of the pen to match the financial and military clout of the US during what became known as the American century. masculine and white in its concerns – tempered only by a grudging, late
The counter-argument is that this army of old soldiers was very male andadmission to the halls of fame of writers such as Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – and that the standard narrative of 20th-century American literature is partial and distorted. This case is made persuasively in Elaine Showalter's recent book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
These contrasting presentations of recent American letters are explored in Capturing America, an eight-part Radio 4 series on which I've been working for several years. And – even before the death of Salinger during final editing – there had been melancholy signs that this was the right time to take stock. The programmes contain the final major interviews with Mailer, Vonnegut and Updike. The latter seemed healthy and energetic in the BBC's New York studio in the autumn of 2008 as he discussed his life-time mission to write "an alphabet of novels". But The Widows of Eastwick, three short of the intended 26 full-length fictions from this man of letters, became the last when he was diagnosed, just 10 days after our conversation (according to the dated poems in Endpoint, his final volume of verse) with the pneumonia that would lead to diagnosi
s of lung cancer and his death on the date that lay in wait for Salinger 12 months later. When I began to think about the series, the question of who was America's greatest living novelist would spark lively debate at a book festival. On the eve of transmission, that medal automatically defaults to Philip Roth, (right).More at The Guardian.
