The rejection of self-celebrating fiction — the anti-rebel / new-sincerity program stated as a verdict
echoes
From: Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think
- Early text: the recoil from "these writers’ radical
self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this
self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters"; the closing
verdict on the sex-cures-despair belief — "It never once occurs to him,
though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole." [e-text]
- IJ echo: The "E Unibus Pluram" program that IJ enacts — the turn away
from self-regarding irony and self-celebration toward a fiction that treats
loneliness as a problem to be solved rather than a pose to be admired. The
Updike review is that program applied as literary judgment: self-absorption
uncritically celebrated is the sickness; the sincere alternative is the
cure.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation