Volume 21, Number 4 · March 21, 1974
Flirting With Disintegration
By Michael Wood
Loose Ends
by Barbara Raskin
Bantam, 313 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 340 pp., $6.95
Searches and Seizures
by Stanley Elkin
Random House, 304 pp., $3.45 (paper)
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
by Grace Paley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 198 pp., $6.95
Nickel Mountain
by John Gardner
Knopf, 320 pp., $6.95
The titles alone of these books offer a sort of cultural history, conjure up a landscape of psychiatrists and crackups, of shaky personal universes threatened, ruined, rescued, and abandoned every other day. Nickel Mountain is different perhaps, suggests either fiscal allegory or a homely, rural geography, but then even that looks like a commentary on the rest or a rebound from them. Only in America (as the phrase used to go) have the nerves been promoted to such starring roles, or at least given such widespread and appreciative coverage. It is as if Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute had bred a whole crew of frantic followers, each one edgier than the last, as if panic had become the only authentic subject left for fiction.
Review, 4857 words
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