Volume 6, Number 11 · June 23, 1966
Fiction à la Mode
By Roger Shattuck
The Diary of a Rapist
by Evan S. Connell Jr.
Simon and Schuster, 252 pp., $4.95
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, 183 pp., $3.95
Omensetter's Luck
by William H. Gass
New American Library, 304 pp., $5.95
While fiction critics hold out manfully for 'narrative art' and pretend they can sight it nowhere outside Saul Bellow, and while the paper-back public follows advertising and packaging in search of a nouveau frisson, two new genres of fiction are making their claims. Poe foresaw one of them: Some of the most imaginative new writing (Hortense Callisher's Journal from Ellipsia is the most recent example) uses many of the conventions of science fiction. The other genre has its explorations like Tristram Shandy and Les Lettres Persanes. There have been so many spoof novels lately that one must be on guard against taking anything, from social realism to pornography, at face value. So long as we have any legs left, they are going to be pulled.
Review, 2830 words
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