Murder of the Middle Class

Three of the most cheerful events in the past decade of American publishing have happened within the preceding twelve months alone, events which prove that despite the everywhere-decried effects of corporations, chain bookstores and the Internet, literary publishing remains, to some degree at least, about the books. In the first two occurrences, at the trade publisher W.W. Norton and then at Henry Holt, the same young editor--inspired by novelists Jonathan Franzen and Stewart O'Nan--acquired and published several early novels of the seminal American writer Paula Fox, followed closely by a collection of short stories by Richard Yates, a writer with an enormous following among contemporary American authors but who had fallen nearly entirely out of print. Credit for the third happy event, this August, goes to Norton again, for launching a republishing program of one of the strangest and most fascinating writers of the twentieth century, Patricia Highsmith.

There's no downside to these three critically important, visionary American writers being brought to new prominence. All had long, fruitful careers, yet all failed, in the common wisdom, to find the audiences they deserved. In the case of Yates and Highsmith, they never really got into what Richard Ford calls "the permanent, big-money main arena of American literary fashion" until after their deaths: Yates appeared in The New Yorker for the first time only this year, and Highsmith was brought into the limelight only by the Hollywood filming of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Fox--who, in the first of two defining differences from her peers in rediscovery, is alive and well and publishing a memoir this autumn--also was published in The New Yorker for the first time some thirty years after writing her first novel, as well as being profiled in the New York Times Magazine, among the other publicity attention that has recently found her.

Most interesting about the three closely linked rediscoveries, however, is that each of these writers, in his or her way, concentrates nearly exclusively on the darker side of human experience, particularly the middle class, white experience, producing novel after novel of relentless desperation and nearly unremitting sadness in characters who lack few of the social or material means to be happy. Of the three--and this is the second defining difference--Fox is the greatest artist, exploring her difficult world with a perfected language, mordant humor and transcendent literary insight that renders as art her portion of the spectrum of human experience.

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