On the Transnational Postmodern

Dan Green:

Although I enjoyed all three of these novels, most recently Natural Novel, their accessibility “between countries and translations” ultimately leaves me feeling ambivalent about them and about the “globalization” of fiction more generally. On the one hand, their metafictional strategies are appealing to me, as a reader sympathetic to this postmodern variant, but on the other hand I also find the thinness of detail and texture vaguely unsastisfying. One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with “foreign” cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture (“Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?” one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism–indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Natural Novel finally reads to me most like a synthesis of the narrative manner and techniques of writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

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