A Theme Emerges | 1988-2023

If a theme is revealed or developed through the books, or through most of the books, populating this web site, I think it can be expressed fairly well by the title of the earliest of them, published in 1988 and called An American Memory.

That phrase, with its key words “American” and “memory,” could almost serve also as the title for the four novels that follow it, since in one way or another those books take up the same places, settings, and characters of the first book, and in one way or another develop the same central and underlying theme—that of something invaluably important being missing, irreplaceably lost.

I believe that this lost and irreplaceable thing is America itself, or what I prefer calling the American republic, or the American nation.

In 2006, at the height of the time when the so-called (and now all but forgotten) “culture wars” were being waged across the country and throughout academia, I brought out my first non-fiction book. It had—still has—the rather long title of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. On that book’s first page, I wrote the following:

I have become grateful for the fact that I was born in 1941, since if I had come onto the scene even, say, five or six years later, I would have missed one of the most important experiences of my life, which was being privileged to get a meaningful impression, at first hand, of what I and many others now think of, rightly, as the “old” America.

That is, I was born just early enough that I was able to see, hear, smell, feel, taste, and walk around in the “first” America, the real one, as opposed to the one we’re left with now: the mass media America, the corporation America, the television America—the empty America.

There it is, the great thing that I often think of as being the most important subject of my own lifetime, of my intellectual life, certainly of my writing life. It is the subject of An American Memory itself, as it is the subject also of the four novels that follow it and that complete—in one way or another—its story: I Am Zoë Handke; The End of the 19th Century; The Decline and Fall of the American Nation; and, finally, the newly available The Book of Reading.