This book is intended as a guide to late twentieth-century American
fiction for the undergraduate student and the general reader. The
principal objective has been to offer substantial and detailed
interpretations of the primary texts, and to suggest contexts in
which those novels might usefully be considered. The discussions of
the novels attempt to achieve a balance between interpretation
and sometimes necessary expository comments, although even
exposition is interpretative in the way that it prioritizes certain
aspects of narrative above others. The chapters take certain subject
areas in American life and investigate their representation in fiction.
This is necessarily a two-way process in which the reading of fiction
conditions what the reader deems to be important in the American
social text, and this relationship is one of the most difficult issues that
this book seeks to tacitly manage: how does a critic move with con¬
fidence between the literary text and the social text? Clearly, it is no
simple correspondence.