PEARL K. BELL
Fiction Chronicle
Publishing has always been a tense and risky mix of commerce, intellec–
tual vocation, and gamesmanship. But these days it is the business com–
ponent that seems to be eclipsing the others. A recent story about a new
imprint at Random House, call ed Turtle Bay Books, appeared not in
The New York Times Book Review
but in the business section of
The
Sunday New York Times,
and it was clear that business was the overriding
concern of the women running this show. In pursuit of "big bucks," the
Times
reported, Turtle Bay is nursing such projects as biographies of
Robert Mapplethorpe and Stanford White, a portrait of Henry Miller by
Erica Jong, and novels by "a follower of Andy Warhol" and the English
writer A. S. Byatt, whose assidu ously learned romance,
Possession,
I
has
been the astonishment of the season, a scholarly
tour de Jorce
that against
all expectations became a best-seller and was sold to the movies for about
half a million dollars.
Most of the novels that received serious critical attention in the past
year could be said to cross the two extremes of jokey postmodern antics
in the spirit of Andy Warhol and the learned literary plenitude of A. S.
Byatt. Though it's always difficult to identify specific trends in con–
temporary fiction - the novel, protean as it is, encompasses an enormous
diversity of sensibility and talent - it is intriguing to note the virtual dis–
appearance of minimalism, which only a few years ago held an entire
generation of young writers in thrall. These days , fullness is all , a far cry
from the stuttering discontinuities of Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Barry
Hannah, and the like.
Maximal is the word for
Possession,
the most unconfined and copi–
ous celebration of the literary life as we are likely to encounter for many
years.
It
is many other things as well: a love story embracing both past
and present, an academic detective story, an epistolary novel that cun–
ningly imitates (not parodies) the loquacious propriety and circumlocu–
tory detachment of learned Victorian correspondents, and a staggering
feat of literary ventriloquism. As though this were not enough, it is also
a spirited attack on Lacanian feminism and theory-besotted deconstruc–
tionist notions about the non-meaning of language ("He had been
taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak
1
Possession.
By A. S. Byatt. R andom
HOllse.
$22.95.
