The decline of region

It is not true that I “blame” the graduate writers’ workshops for the decline of region and place in American fiction, as one commentator charges. Nor am I suggesting that locating fiction requires a novelist to immortalize his hometown—as John O’Hara did to Pottstown Pottsville (Gibbsville in the novel) in Appointment in Samarra. Although The Great Gatsby is not set in Fitzgerald’s native St. Paul, it does not take place in some nebulous utopia. The “holocaust” that occurs in the novel could have occurred nowhere else but on Long Island.

So strongly is Long Island identified with Gatsby, in fact, that Alice McDermott—a child of the Island—explicitly sets herself in a line of descent from Fitzgerald. In Charming Billy (1998), she describes the characteristically lower middle-class Long Island of her fiction as a “toehold in a world of spacious lawns and famous artists and summer colonies where wealthy people had once called their mansions cottages. . . .”

McDermott is unusual for her generation, though. When one of her contemporaries makes use of a Long Island setting—think of the suburban house to which Sammy and Rosa move in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for example—the result is an exact fictional address (127 Lavoisier Street, Bloomtown) and a hasty evocation of a place that could be located almost anywhere (“as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns, and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself”).

The problem is that an entire generation of American writers since 1970 has belonged to a common tradition, sharing a common background and forging common ties:

Richard Ford (MFA, Irvine, 1970)
Kent Haruf (MFA, Iowa, 1973)
Thom Jones (MFA, Iowa, 1973)
T. C. Boyle (MFA, Iowa, 1974)
Allan Gurganus (MFA, Iowa, 1974)
Ron Hansen (MFA, Iowa, 1974)
Denis Johnson (MFA, Iowa, 1974)
Edward P. Jones (MFA, Virginia, n.d.)
Melvin Jules Bukiet (MFA, Columbia, 1976)
Ellen Gilchrist (MFA, Arkansas, 1976)
Alice McDermott (MA, New Hampshire, 1978)
Tobias Wolff (Wallace Stegner Fellow; MA, Stanford, 1978)
Jayne Anne Phillips (MFA, Iowa, 1978)
Louise Erdrich (MA, Hopkins, 1979)
Lee Martin (MFA, Arkansas, n.d.)
Michael Cunningham (MFA, Iowa, 1980)
Jim Shepard (MFA, Brown, 1980)
Madison Smartt Bell (MA, Hollins, 1981)
Cristina Garcia (MA, Hopkins, 1981)
Richard Russo (MFA, Arizona, 1981)
Padgett Powell (MFA, Houston, 1982)
Bob Shacochis (MFA, Iowa, 1982)
Robert Olmstead (MFA, Syracuse, 1983)
Eileen Pollack (MFA, Iowa, 1983)
David Wroblewski (MFA, Warren Wilson College, n.d.)
Susan Straight (MFA, UMass Amherst, 1984)
Brad Watson (MFA, Alabama, 1985)
Michael Chabon (MFA, Irvine, 1986)
Jeffrey Eugenides (MA, Stanford, 1986)
Ann Patchett (MFA, Iowa, 1987)
David Foster Wallace (MFA, Arizona, 1987)
A. M. Homes (MFA, Iowa, 1988)
Tom Perrotta (MFA, Syracuse, 1988)
Renè Steinke (MFA, Virginia, 1988)
Dan Chaon (MFA, Syracuse, 1990)
Elizabeth McCracken (MFA, Iowa, 1990)
Christine Schutt (MFA, Columbia, n.d.)
Abraham Verghese (MFA, Iowa, 1991)
Paul Harding (MFA, Iowa, n.d.)
Jhumpa Lahiri (MA, Boston University, n.d.)
Janet Peery (MFA, Wichita State, 1992)
Junot Diaz (MFA, Cornell, n.d.)
Kevin Canty (MFA, Arizona, 1993)
Edwidge Danticat (MFA, Brown, 1993)
Martha McPhee (MFA, Columbia, 1994)
Susan Choi (MFA, Cornell, 1995)
Bonnie Jo Campbell (MFA, Western Michigan, 1998)
Tova Mirvis (MFA, Columbia, 1998)
Alice Sebold (MFA, Irvine, 1998)
Kamila Shamsie (MFA, UMass-Amherst, n.d.)
Adam Haslett (MFA, Iowa, 1999)
Z. Z. Packer (MFA, Iowa, 1999)
Rachel Kushner (MFA, Columbia, 2000)
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (MFA, Iowa, n.d.)
Salvatore Scibona (MFA, Iowa, n.d.)
Joshua Ferris (MFA, Irvine, 2003)
Daniyal Mueenuddin (MFA, Arizona, 2004)

The foregoing list could have been extended even farther. What outsiders to university life may not fully realize is that academic disciplines are organized nationally rather than locally. Academic openings are not advertised in the local paper, but in a national job list. The case of someone like Susan Straight, a native of Riverside, California (my own hometown), who moved up from teaching at the city’s junior college to a professorship at the University of California campus there, is vanishingly rare. Career advancement typically entails packing up and relocating across the country.

In truth, the whole idea of a literary career has been redefined since 1970 in academic terms. When she graduated with a masters degree from Harvard in 1969, Francine Prose followed her husband to India and launched herself as a novelist by writing a novel. “What’s hard to get people to understand now is, at that time, there were hardly any MFA programs, and no idea of a career track for writers,” she said later, looking back upon the start of her career. She did not even have a “sense of career” when she started out—“it was much more like play,” she said.

Now, however, a young writer settles upon a literary career by attending a graduate writers’ workshop where she will be instructed in a curriculum that varies little from school to school, and certainly not according to the place where the school happens to be located. After graduation she will join something like a diplomatic corps, being posted from place to place, most likely without ever setting down roots in anything but the common background and common ties of her generation.