Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (review)
John W. Aldridge is perhaps best known for his 1951 critical study of postwar writers, After the Lost Generation. Now, forty years later, Aldridge is back with a scathing evaluation of the newest generation of American writers. Aldridge's subtitle for the book, Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction, accurately sums up his overall criticism of the past decade or so of American fiction. The successful new writers, he argues, are accomplished stylists, with "only moderate intellectual culture . . . and apparently no sense that they belong to a literary tradition that might prove nourishing if they were able and willing to learn from it." Aldridge is particularly critical of the exclusive new "fraternity" of university-trained writers, MFA students who belong to their own, rather limiting culture, "[f]or what finally counts in the fraternity system of values is not the quality of the work produced but the continued existence and promotion of writers."