Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction

Professor Aldridge has admittedly taken on some easy targets in this, a no-nonsense demolition of trendy "minimalist" writers and their ilk. Much of what he says about, for example, Bret Easton Ellis' terrible (and aptly titled) "Less Than Zero" is somewhat less than profound. But even so, I happen to find merit in the "cranky old man" school of literary criticism (chaired by Harold Bloom); it's important to have critics like Aldridge, who have a strong sense of the history of literature, who refuse to go along with the wave of mindless enthusiasm that accompanies whatever flavor-of-the-month the mass media hoists upon the rest of us. I take issue with some of Aldridge's arguments here. Judging from his complaints about the "hermetically sealed" nature of much contemporary literature, it sounds like he belongs to the fiction-as-sociology school of thought. Personally, I do not believe that literature need be a commentary on society, and in fact more than a few "classic" writers have gone their merry way without fretting much about the social and/or political relevance of their books. (I also had a few problems with Aldridge's rather undistinguished prose, and found myself marvelling at all the sentences that ramble on and on without benefit of commas.) But his larger point is quite correct: that these writers seem out of touch with the society they seek to describe. His complaints about the cloistered creative writing industry--which, as Aldridge puts it, regularly produces scribes who seem not to have read any books they haven't written themselves--are essentially right on target. It is also worth pointing out that this refreshingly non-technical book can be easily approached by general readers unfamiliar with academic theory.