Volume 23, Number 12 · July 15, 1976
American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction
By Gore Vidal
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology
by Roland Barthes
Beacon Press
S/Z
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang
The Pleasure of the Text
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang
The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers
by Joe David Bellamy
University of Illinois Press
Come Back, Dr. Caligari
by Donald Barthelme
Little, Brown, Anchor paperback (paper)
Snow White
by Donald Barthelme
Atheneum, Bantam paperback (paper)
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
City Life
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Sadness
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Bantam paperback (paper)
Guilty Pleasures
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Dell paperback (paper)
The Dead Father
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love
by Grace Paley
Viking, NAL paperback (paper)
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
by Grace Paley
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Omensetter's Luck
by William Gass
NAL
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
by William Gass
Harper and Row
The Floating Opera
by John Barth
Doubleday, revised edition, Bantam paperback (paper)
The End of the Road
by John Barth
Doubleday, revised edition, Bantam paperback (paper)
The Sot-Weed Factor
by John Barth
Doubleday, revised edition, Bantam paperback (paper)
Giles Goat-Boy
by John Barth
Doubleday, Fawcett paperback (paper)
Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth
Doubleday, Bantam paperback (paper)
Chimera
by John Barth
Random House
V.
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, Bantam paperback (paper)
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, Bantam paperback (paper)
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Viking, Bantam paperback (paper)
The New Novel is close to forty years old. Although forty is young for an American presidential candidate or a Chinese buried egg, it is very old indeed for a literary movement, particularly a French literary movement. But then what, recently, has one heard of the New Novel, whose official vernissage occurred in 1938 with Nathalie Sarraute's publication of Tropismes? The answer is not much directly from the founders but a good deal indirectly, for, with characteristic torpor, America's Departments of English have begun slowly, slowly to absorb the stern aesthetics of Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet, not so much through the actual writing of these masters as through their most brilliant interpreter, the witty, meta-camp sign-master and analyst of le degré zéro de l'écriture Roland Barthes, whose amused and amusing saurian face peers like some near-sighted chameleon from the back of a half dozen slim volumes now being laboriously read in Academe.
Review, 11203 words
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