Working around an extended central analogy that compares the
making of literature to the making of a garden, this article examines
how narratives of a specific type are, and have been, privileged in
American fiction and why those narratives have become thin, passionless,
and pale. While examining economic factors in publishing and
analyzing specific examples from short story and novel, the resistance
to increasingly non-homogenized and dialectically interrelated works
is explored in light of the irony and enigma it presents: why have writers
resisted such change even as that change has created opportunity
and yield? The imperative too often underlying the work of American
writers —that permanency of identity is the only means to an orderly
existence— has failed; it is in the narratives where more and different
modalities of existence encompass greater variety that we have found,
and will find, the truly novel in the making of contemporary American
literature.
