NONFICTION - April 19, 1992

TALENTS AND TECHNICIANS: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction by John W. Aldridge (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $24.95; 162 pp.) Academics have bemoaned the loss of “standards” in American culture for so long that few these day even bother to formulate their complaints as argument. Fortunately, University of Michigan English professor John W. Aldridge still believes in debate, and the result is “Talents and Technicians,” a telling indictment of much modern fiction. Although he praises some talents--Don DeLillo, T. C. Boyle--Aldridge is mainly interested in showing that many of today’s respected writers are emperors without clothes whose work exhibits a “thinness of conception and opaqueness of execution” (he cites as example Raymond Carver) or is nothing more than “a kind of literary tranquilizer” (the Barthelmes, Amy Hempel, Anne Beattie). I suspect history will side with Aldridge; at one point he argues convincingly, for example, that David Leavitt sidesteps the essential literary task by treating family troubles as if they were endemic to society rather than caused by distinct, individual events or attitudes. That simple criticism, and all it implies about the fiction writer’s need to pass judgment and to give writing a moral center, applies to a huge percentage of novelists working today. Aldridge, to be sure, is a bit of a curmudgeon, but he’s right to blame the current dearth of good fiction on a self-referential literary community that discourages risk-taking, promotes technical mastery over literary content, and has generally come to regard writing as more profession than calling.