Past Piff: In the Narrative Garden of Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract

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.