Bureaucracy and regionalism

The writers’ workshops have established a nationalized bureaucracy of writers who, in their professional lives, are more loyal to the organizational culture of creative writing, which stretches from coast to coast—and to their own career advancement—than to the locales in which they accidentally find themselves.

The result has been, ever since the emergence of a literary generation whose experience is limited to creative writing, the almost complete disappearance of regionalism from American fiction. Where, for example, is Michael Chabon’s “little postage stamp of earth”? Or Paul Auster’s? Or Denis Johnson’s? T. C. Boyle has never set two novels in the same place. Jonathan Franzen began his career by chronicling St. Louis’s demographic decline to the rank of Twenty-Seventh City, but then immediately he abandoned the scene of his growing up. The Corrections is set all over the place: in the vaguely located Midwestern city of St. Jude, at D——— College, in a New York consisting of familiar names but no specific details, in suburban Philadelphia, principally indoors, even in a post-Soviet Lithuania about which the best that can be said is No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—which does not make it feel any more Lithuanian.

For American novelists who have begun their careers since 1970, geographical variation appears to be a way of lending variety to their novels. Even Francine Prose, who mainly sets her fiction in New York and its environs, where she has lived most of her life, wanders from place to place within this relatively small geographical area: the Hudson River Valley in Primitive People, Fire Island and Manhattan (and then Arizona, where she briefly taught) in Hunters and Gatherers, the city and Rockland County in A Changed Man, the Taconics in Goldengrove.

And when a writer “roots” his fiction in a place, it is often to create a base from which to launch expeditions elsewhere—as when Tim O’Brien sets In the Lake of the Woods in his native Minnesota so that his characters can turn to more important matters, including flashbacks and memories and secrets. Much the same is true for Frank Bascombe in Richard Ford’s overpraised trilogy. The novels are headquartered in New Jersey, where the ex-Sportswriter has a home. But Frank Bascombe’s New Jersey is not Philip Roth’s New Jersey. As a real estate agent, Bascombe is dedicated to moving property, not settling on it. The New Jersey of Ford’s novels is merely representative of American suburban sprawl. Which is to say that it can be found everywhere and nowhere.

There are exceptions, of course. One reason Marilynne Robinson stands apart from the rest of her generation is in her abiding respect for place and her clear determination to plant fiction firmly in a specific locale. Although Housekeeping takes place in a small Idaho town and Gilead takes place in a small Iowa town, Robinson returns to the setting of her second novel in writing Home, her third, testifying to her ambition to burrow more deeply into the story of the place. Her readers could find themselves around Gilead, Iowa, by using her novels as a map. Geography is of equal importance to Richard Russo. Although they are in three different states, the deteriorating rust-belt cities of Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls—Russo’s three best novels—illustrate what Allen Tate calls “that habit of men in a given locality which influences them to certain patterns of thought and conduct handed to them by their ancestors.”

With these words Tate defines regionalism, and Russo cannot exactly be described as a regionalist. Better to say that the characters in his best books inhabit equivalent sociological milieux. The regional differences between New York, Pennsylvania, and Maine interest Russo less than the sociological similarities.

The sort of regionalism defined by Tate has yielded to the national network of writers’ workshops. Even a writing program like Stanford’s, which was founded by the regionalist writers Wallace Stegner and Yvor Winters, has been nationalized. Creative writers are now primarily committed to their art or craft, which is just another way of saying that their client is the agency which trained and employs them. They may have offices in different locations, but their ambitions and interests have been centralized.