Deplorable Storytelling

The novelist and critic Gore Vidal described the diverging paths of the American novel in a 1974 essay in which he observed that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe wrote traditional “public novels” for a wide (though dwindling) audience. More recently, a new type of fiction, the “university novel,” had emerged, produced by the expanding ranks of scholar/novelists employed by college English departments. Vidal scathingly described these works as “parthenogenesis novels intended only for the classroom”—books rarely read by general audiences, who found them irrelevant to their lives. Into this burgeoning genre he bundled the works of American followers of the French New Novel—Donald Barthelme and John Barth, for instance.