COMPOSURE AND DECOMPOSITION:
THREE PIECES ON
THE FICTION COLLECTIVE
A few years ago, serious novelists began to express their
concern that the large commercial publishers were more devoted
to
cookbooks than fiction, that many fine novels were being shuffled
through the labyrinth of mass distribution, that the publishers were
only interested in movie options anyway. There is an element of
perennial complaint
to
these charges, and it does seem true that the
paranoia of the committed writer increases with the giantism of the
publishers, and is compounded by the recognition that there are so
many other good writers out there.
It was as a response
to
so bleak an outlook for fiction that a group
of young novelists-Jonathan Baumbach, Ronald Sukenick, Peter
Spielberg, Mark Mirsky and others, writers who had each done several
books with the major houses-decided
to
represent themselves as the
Fiction Collective, an outfit that by now has brought over twenty books
to
press in the past five years. The intention of the Fiction Collective
has been to present to the public (through the distribution agencies of
Braziller) outstanding fictions that might otherwise have gone unpub–
lished by the publishing conglomerates, or that might have been
printed by one of the numerous small independent presses contribut–
ing to the unprecedented expansion of creative expression, especially
poetry, that started in the sixties. The number of books of competent
quality that get published, or sometimes self-published, these days is
higher than ever, and I suppose this particular resonation of demo–
cratic populism is as much a part of the music of our moment as
Jimmy Carter and the new evangelicism.
The work put out by the Fiction Collective is experimental, and
the best analogue for its efforts in publishing circles is the list
published over the years by James Laughlin at New Directions. Almost
all the books issued by the Fiction Collective have been formally
innovative, perhaps a bit too self-consciously at times, part of a
pleasing yet simultaneously irritating postmodernist fascination with
the apparently inexhaustible variability of aesthetic form. The Fiction
Collective writers belong to a larger contemporary artistic grouping
that is partly identified by the complications of its idiom (among
writers, figures like Borges and Burroughs, Barthelme, Pynchon,
