All things must pass

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2007 was a rough year for the American literary pantheon, with the deaths of Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley and Norman Mailer. The three writers died within 7 months of each other, all at the age of 84. That’s just one of the connections Morris Dickstein mines in an essay for this Sunday’s Book Review, in which he explores what made these three authors resonate. For Dickstein, what’s important are not the similarities between them, which he sees as largely non-existent, but the fact that each had his or her own individual style. All three writers were shaped by their experiences, by the political milieu of post-World War II America, but also by the critical conversation over the so-called death of the novel, which animated American literary culture in those years.

This, Dickstein suggests, ‘points to something these contemporaries ... had in common: a sense of the breakdown of the novel, blurring the lines between literary fiction and autobiography, but also poetry in Paley’s case, science fiction for Vonnegut, journalism and social criticism for Mailer.’

David L. Ulin