I noted Katie Roiphe's contrast of the carnality of the 20th century's Great Male Novelists (eg Philip Roth) and their contemporary counterparts (eg Jonathan Safran Foer) last week. Ross offers some historical context to her argument:
This strikes me as very perceptive, even if I’m a bit disappointed that the phrase “emo boy” didn’t find it’s way into Roiphe’s putdown of the modern young male novelist.
I wonder, though, if what she describes as the “puritanical” streak in contemporary fiction — an artifact of what Roiphe describes, elsewhere in the essay, as our “more conservative time” — has more to do with the exhaustion of the transgressive impulse than with any real return to the kind of moral-aesthetic strictures that a Roth or an Updike helped to overthrow. A jaded and self-conscious caution about the transformative possibilities of sex, after all, isn’t really the same thing as a revived puritanism — and what’s more, I think, it doesn’t provide anything like the same opportunities for would-be literary adventurers looking for something to push off against. Updike wouldn’t have been Updike, for instance, if he had started out as a novelist in the age of Lady Gaga and streaming online pornography.
