104
PARTISAN REVIEW
lence, abrupt changes of scene and mood - but she never permits
them to stifle emotion or blur the moral clarity of her vision.
Since memory is obviously the source of the reality she com–
mands, Minot is aware of the debt that the present owes to the past ,
which also casts its shadow on the precarious accommodations of
the future. This is how she sees the family after they have flung the
mother's ashes into the sea: "Up the ramp they went, in single file,
feeling something lofty in their procession, hearing flags billow and
snap, following at one another's heels, no one with the slightest idea,
when they raised their heads and looked around, of where to go ." In
prose as unyielding and clean and bare as a weathered bone , Susan
Minot comes right to the heart of grief for those who must go on
living.
Despite all the critical attention lavished these days on the
apostles of the present tense , traditional novelists have not yet re–
treated completely into resentful silence. Anti-intellectualism may
be rampant among the postmodernists, but there are still hard-work–
ing and serious novelists around who believe in the literary vitality
that can be derived from the interplay of ideas, the exploration of
manners and morals, the role of politics and social dilemmas in every–
day life.
It
is nonetheless true, as
The Economist
(that cool eye of reality)
observed last autumn, that "American fiction needs a genius or two ."
The big guns of the postwar American novel- Bellow, Malamud,
Mailer, Roth - are either gone; or publish relatively little (only
one novel from Bellow since he won the Nobel Prize in 1976); or
wind up for a greatness they don't deliver, like Mailer; or chew the
same autobiographical cud over and over, like Philip Roth . (Perhaps
Roth is about to surprise us, but his new novel ,
The Counterlife ,
which
may at last be about something other than the wages of sinful suc–
cess , was still under wraps when this review was written .)
In the younger generation, no one has matched the industry
and fluent inventiveness of John Updike, nor come so close to real–
izing the utopian ambition of appealing to a general audience with–
out having to compromise . That he is as erudite as he is prolific,
blessed with unflagging intellectual energy, is demonstrated week
after week in his
New Yorker
reviews . Unfortunately his new novel,
Roger's Version,
which at first promises to mine a fresh lode of discovery
and exaltation, is an acrobatic stunt on one level, and a wearying
reprise , on another, of the predictable Updike fixations with God
