Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grim central image of modern spy literature is the death of Alec Leamas, shot by G.D.R. Grenzpolizisten at the Wall in the last scene of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. John le Carre's bleak and entirely believable novel was published in 1963, only two years after the East German regime built the Wall. Since then, Le Carre's surviving operatives and those of Len Deighton, another notable English spymaster, have made dodgy livings evading Vopos at the Wall, armed with little but false passports and the turned-up collars of their raincoats...
...pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme...
Faced with these developments, Wolfe decided to write Bonfire in order to prove a point, "namely, that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism . . . that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him." This realism, argues Wolfe, was what characterized the success of writers as varied as Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Lewis, whose Elmer Gantry prefigured the Jim Bakker affair by more than half a century. Nor is Wolfe too modest to add that such realism is what "created the 'absorbing' or 'gripping...
...feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson...
Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe...