Word: patches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novelist John Irving, who has already ridden into town, cleaned out the banks, and ridden out again unharmed." While it is impossible to sum up Epstein's thoughts on American fiction, criticism, and literary life in general, his general theme is that "literature is going through a very bad patch at present...
...explanation for this so-called patch is what Epstein describes as the dispersed literary culture of the United States. American literati are spread out in the hundreds of universities across the nation, and while the university provides novelists with security and stability, it also narrows the range of their experience. The result, on the page, is a glut of "fornication and fashionable ideas, which seem to be the chief forms of experience and knowledge available at contemporary universities...
...Performance in Los Angeles, will go on buying trips to the Midwest to ferret out some good old numbers that have long been packed away -- perhaps in embarrassment. Now, in the islands, says Dave Rockland of Surf Line Hawaii, "we're fighting to make deliveries. It's the Cabbage Patch doll phenomenon...
...north along the shore of the pond and to the north you can hear occasional low growls. Near you is a pile of dead leaves." If the player should then type, "Examine the leaves," the program responds, "Under the leaves you see an old rusted grating set into a patch of broken concrete." And the adventure begins...
...Fortunately, some Harvard graduates learned how to write for grownups. With unintended irony, Segal includes a patch of verse by John Updike (class of '54) that says more about those years in five lines than the novel does in nearly 600 pages...