John Aldridge says in the preface to this book that “the first responsibility of the critic is to function as a monitor of taste, to challenge fashionable opinion,” and throughout it he remains true to that conception of the critic’s function. The result is a useful if not very original dissection of the gutless fiction of the minimalist and Brat-Pack schools and of the invariably dreary products of university “creative writing” courses. Aldridge’s heroes, and therefore the setters of the standards of taste by which he judges these younger writers, are Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Much as I sympathize with his outrage at the literary pretensions of novelists like Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ann Beattie, it does not seem altogether fair to me to criticize them for not being Norman Mailer or Kurt Vonnegut. On the contrary, this is one thing to be said in their favor. I also found myself wishing for a few more examples of what it is that he is criticizing. His constantly reiterated point about the modern American fiction that he doesn’t like is that it is featureless: all its practitioners seem to write in similar, almost interchangeable styles. Thus he may have supposed that selected quotations would inevitably be a misrepresentation of it and suggest a degree of character that it does not possess.

He’s got a point. It takes very little acquaintance with what publishers and publicists seem to consider the distinguished fiction of our