Salinger's Glass Stories as a Composite Novel, and: In Recognition of William Gaddis (review)
In America the 1950s were remarkable yearsÂ—years of aggressive complacency and self-assured paranoia; years that deployed ubiquitous televisions, carboncopy tract houses, and huge automobiles. Long after they ceased to create active issues, Joseph McCarthy and the Rosenbergs left a political atmosphere so obsessively discreet that by 1960 it became virtually impossible to distinguish Kennedy's politics from Nixon's. Because one implicitly understood that conforming to the narrow center of American life brought prosperity, to replicate and to imitate were virtues, whereas the term "nonconformist" was a dangerous pejorative. At the periphery of our metropolis on the hill, however, lay the same dark woods and Black Man who waited to lure the Puritan fathers from their