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PARTISAN REVIEW
haps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose or draw."
It is
right here, I propose, that we arrive at the heart of the problem, the
lack of excitement generated by our new writers. In most recent fic–
tion, no one seems to want much of anything; even the secrets are
nerveless. Here is what one character reveals of another in a proto–
typical short story, "Keats," from the collection,
In Constant Flight,
by
a heralded newcomer, Elizabeth Tallent: "'My intuition told me I
should never have tried to drive through Wyoming on the way to
Cincinnati,' he said. 'But I have always had this nameless longing to
see antelope.' That was his word, 'longing.'" It is hard to know what
to make of such a declaration, placed rather strategically at a point
in the story where the abandoned lover, Luke, has just suffered a
head fracture. Are we to understand that he is appealing-mutely,
via someone else's "nameless longing to see antelope"- to the nar–
rator for a sympathy convergent with love? The effect is striking,
certainly, but wholly oblique, and it may well require too much
filling-in for most readers. Gardner again: "One of the most com–
mon mistakes among young writers ... is the idea that a story gets
its power from withheld information- that is, from the writer's set–
ting the reader up and then bushwacking him." Tallent rarely bush–
wacks, I'll say that for her; she just withholds. Children and lovers
come and go, seemingly beyond inspiration. There is often a dog or
cat who ignites a flicker of passion (the Keats in "Keats" whose cus–
tody is at issue, thereby connecting Luke and his ex-girlfriend, is
a dog), but it is still a far cry from the leap into the lyric which Ju–
piter, the abidingly high-spirited retriever, evokes at the end ofjohn
Cheever's "The Country Husband": "Then it is dark; it is a night
where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."
The men and women in Tallent's honed but oddly tangential
stories are beyond inspiration, even the inspiration of images. All is
steadfastly ironic, her characters' wishes as washed-out as old blue
jeans. There is, of course, an established lineage from which this
style of cool obliquity descends. Renata Adler tried to pin together
a novel,
Speedboat,
with scraps of hip observation- "I don't know
what it means. I am in this brownstone."-some years ago. Donald
Barthelme and Robert Coover were among the earliest, and best,
practitioners of the form in what is probably its natural habitat, the
short story. Ann Beattie has been its most visible exemplar for a
while now, although her talent is such that she does manage, some of
the time, to suggest a genuine poignancy. But this school-and once
an influence becomes enshrined it becomes just that- advocating
the tireless use of brandnames and deadpan dialogue, has its in-
