FICTION'S NEW FAB FOUR

By R.Z. Sheppard

What a difference a decade makes. Mediagenic writers like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s. But those authors have now faded into their own material, symbols of the superficialities they exploited in their fiction.

Why? One explanation is that literature is no more immune to changing fashions than any other form of entertainment. Novels that reflect only the glittering moment usually turn out to be artifacts, not art. Another reason is that literary fiction of the past two decades, good at dramatizing personal crises, has rarely attempted to engage the tumult of the wider world. Social disorder is handled more efficiently in nonfiction, journalism or seductively moving images. Who needs to plow through an imaginative verbal construct when the content is available in more accessible forms?

Fiction writer Jonathan Franzen faced that fact last year in a long, fretful article in Harper's magazine. "The novelist," he wrote, "has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"

But Franzen's gloomy observation has not deflected him or three other gifted writers of his acquaintance: Donald Antrim, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, last year's young literary comet. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names.

Wallace's wit and funky erudition encores this year in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown; 353 pages; $23.95), a collection of essays and highly personalized journalism. Writing about subjects as unrelated as tennis, Dostoyevsky and Caribbean cruise ships, Wallace again demonstrates powers of split-screen vision and information processing that should be measured in megabytes rather than IQ points.

Franzen and the others may benefit from Wallace's success. The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen's deft social-science fiction about a former Bombay police chief who plots to take over St. Louis, Missouri, first published in 1988, was recently released in paperback (Noonday Press; 517 pages; $15).

Franzen displays a striking talent for turning an implausible plot into a convincing omen. Middle-class flight, a shriveled tax base and the usual urban rumpuses encourage St. Louis authorities to hire S. Jammu, a woman related to Indira Gandhi, to run its police department. Soon Jammu and her imported Indian co-conspirators launch a power grab that includes Orwellian public relations, kidnappings and pet assassinations. Franzen's twisty plot and thriller pace are the sweeteners that mask his caustic commentary on urban decline.

Donald Antrim's recently published novel, The Hundred Brothers (Crown; 206 pages; $21), is a family fantasy that capers between atavistic ritual and inspired slapstick. Antrim delivers a nightmare version of a clan reunion as his sibling horde gathers to search for their father's ashes and abuse one another. The brothers, nearly all eccentric if not insane, include a giant, a compulsive whisperer, an expert in the sexual language of insects, and the narrator, who morphs into a Mesoamerican corn god.

In contrast, Rick Moody's Purple America (Little, Brown; 298 pages; $23.95) lights the road to chaos with creepy realism. Like Wallace, Moody knows it takes an extra tweak of the commonplace to turn diversion into gnawing unease. He opens his story with a son giving his invalid mother a bath. The uncomfortably Oedipal theme is underscored by a prose style as ominous as a Greek chorus: "Whosoever knows the folds and complexities of his own mother's body, he shall never die. Whosoever knows the latitudes of his mother's body, whosoever has taken her into his arms and immersed her baptismally in the first-floor tub..."; the forbidding litany builds for four more pages.

Purple America is essentially about our fateful relationship with Mother Earth. The nuclear power plant in Moody's fictional Connecticut town is leaking radioactive waste into Long Island Sound. The contrast between the old woman's wasting nerve disease and the aging utility's malfunctioning plumbing is resonant without being unduly obvious. Moody's sentences may occasionally run too hot, and his radioactive menace is a bit familiar. But Purple America's characters are emotionally intricate, and its tensions adroitly controlled.

To one degree or another, each member in this prodigiously talented quartet has attachments to earlier purveyors of black humor, like William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon (whose new novel, Mason & Dixon, will be published later this month). But beyond sharing some literary influences, the younger apocalyptic foursome do not hype themselves as part of a new literary movement. "I think we're all white males between 30 and 40, as far as I know" is how Wallace coyly describes the group. Yet the mutual affinities of these writers are real and nearly as complex as their antic plots.

All are graduates of elite Eastern colleges. Moody and Antrim were friends at Brown. Wallace concentrated on philosophy and English literature at Amherst, while Franzen majored in German at Swarthmore. The latter two became close after Wallace wrote a Franzen fan letter about the time Franzen met Moody, who was then an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which first published The Twenty-Seventh City. What's more, Antrim and Franzen visit regularly for what the latter calls "anguished conversation," and Wallace and Moody have the same editor at Little, Brown.

But more important, these men share a serious like-mindedness. Wallace adds some critical mass to the kinship in his new essay collection. "The next real literary 'rebels' in this country," he writes, "might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching...who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."

It's a telling point. Irony, the enemy of deep feeling and strong belief, is a defense mechanism that too often produces unearned cynicism and cheap effects. Good satire pricks hypocrisy, but it also has a tragic dimension that reminds us of our common fate. "Heavy," as they used to say. But the best of each generation gropes for new forms of authentic expression. Based on their current output, Wallace, Franzen, Antrim and Moody are, without a doubt, among American fiction's most promising works in progress.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York