POST-MODERN FICTION
431
surance and economy about troubles, they need to be working in a
milieu where there is at least some awareness of issues. And in the
troubled years after the Second World War it was precisely this
awareness that was often lacking.
A few serious writers did try to fix in their novels the amorphous
"troubledness" of postwar American experience. In
The Violated,
an enormous realistic narrative about some ordinary people who
reach adulthood during the war, Vance Bourjailly seemed consciously
to be dramatizing a view of American society quite similar to the
one I have sketched here. He chose to write one of those full-scale
narratives composed of parallel strands of plot-a technique which
assumes that society is distinctly articulated, that its classes are both
sharply visible and intrinsically interesting, and that a novelist can
arrange a conflict between members of these classes which will be
dramatic in its own right and emblematic of larger issues. But for
the material Bourjailly chose-the lives of bewildered yet not un–
characteristic drifters during the past two decades-these assump–
tions could not operate with sufficient force; and as
his
characters,
in the sameness of their misery, melted into one another, so the
strands of his narrative, also having no inevitable reason for separate
existence, collapsed into one another.
Norman Mailer, trying in
The Deer Park
to compose a novel
about the malaise of our years, avoided the cumbersomeness of the
traditional social novel but could find no other structure that would
give coherence to his perceptions. Mailer tried to embody his keen
if unstable vision in a narrative about people whose extreme dislo–
cation of experience and feeling would, by the very fact of their
extreme dislocation, come to seem significant. But in its effort to
portray our drifting and boredom full-face, in its fierce loyalty to the
terms of its own conception,
The Deer Park
tended to become a
claustrophobic work, driving attention inward, toward its own tonal
peculiarities, rather than outward, as an extending parable. Through–
out the novel Mailer had to fall back upon
his
protagonist, through
whom he tried to say that which he found hard to show.
IV
A whole group of novelists, among the best of recent years, has
found itself responding to immediate American experience by choos–
ing subjects and locales that are apparently far removed from that
