Until recently, if you wanted to know all about contemporary American novels without actually having to read any of them, you went to the library and paged through a dozen or so critical studies, among them Tony Tanner’s City of Words, Leslie Fiedler’s Waiting for the End, and Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence. These were all nice, manageable books, tightly organized, neatly argued, their theses lucidly expressed in their opening sections and reasonably well developed thereafter, through the course of eight or ten chapters that dealt briefly and precisely with fifteen or twenty major novels. Some were better written than others, some more incisive or entertaining; but each had a clear reason for existing, for each had a somewhat different way of looking at things. These were civilized books, which co-existed peacefully in the same territory, and their authors nodded at each other every once in a while, acknowledging each other’s work genially and accepting their unavoidable differences with equanimity. To read through them, one after another, was to walk from window to window in a single house, looking out at the same landscape from a series of different perspectives.

Enter American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation by Frederick R. Karl.[1]Several times the size of most of its predecessors, it is patently designed to eliminate the need for Tanner’s and Fiedler’s and Hassan’s window views (which, according to Karl, “all fall short . . . of being sufficiently inclusive”) and to