In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction
has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this
new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a
critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover,
William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald
Barthelme.
According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions
of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world.
While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic
practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more
acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer
"realistic"; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is
discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen,
and uncertainly known -- all terms taken from new physics.
Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy,
and "open" endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled
promises and completed patterns.
Gravity's Rainbow, for
example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Strehle argues
that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century
history, politics, science, and discourse.