An American Antidote to Rage

“The information isn’t frozen, you are,” Michael Herr said in Dispatches, maybe the best book about the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, information keeps streaming through us, at a higher and higher velocity, and we are frozen. Our best writers can unfreeze us. They override the notion that we’re helpless, and sometimes they do it paradoxically, by depicting people who are paralyzed and stuck. In this final installment of my American literature series, I will focus on a few post-World War II writers who tell us about our information-addled, alienated selves, and assess the chances of finding refuge: Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bishop.