A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier

      The age of American mass culture and its attendant anxieties has come and gone. Today, books, music, and news outlets are available to suit any individual’s narrow tastes and outlook. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and an unabashed celebrant of the emergent niche culture, puts it this way: “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes” (5). For Anderson, these multitudes signal the technology-aided triumph of the forces of cultural democratization; others express anxiety about our lack of unity and stability, the loss of an American “common culture” that connects people of disparate backgrounds and perspectives. There are now, it is said, too many channels on the television, purveyors of news, and means of communication, and this surfeit of choices threatens America’s literature, its culture, its democracy, and even, in an age of anxiety about sleeper cells, its national security. “Diversity,” Cass Sunstein wrote in 2002, “is a wonderful thing, but fragmentation carries serious social risks” (206).¹

      The current conversation between fragmentation’s partisans and opponents would likely surprise mid-century culture critics, for many of whom the one-size-fits-all mass culture of the 1950s appeared to be a quasi-apocalyptic end, the inevitable result of the marriage of technology and capitalism. Thus for fifteen years after the end of World War II, the urgent cultural and political problem was said to be the opposite of fragmentation: too much manufactured unity, too little diversity, too few choices, a too-passive populace. As Louis Menand notes, television sets in the mid-1950s “had twelve VHF channels, all except three of which probably broadcast static” (115). The result was a uniformity that might now seem inconceivable: whereas the top-rated television show of 2005, CSI, drew 15 percent of the television-watching audience (Chris Anderson 37), Milton Berle in 1948 drew 87 percent (Baughman, Same Time 51), and the top-rated show of 1954, I Love Lucy, 74 percent (Chris Anderson 29). Definitions of mass culture are frequently contested, but there seems little question that television in the mid-1950s is an example of it: a moment that in retrospect seems singular, when an unthinkably large audience of culture consumers, made possible by the combination of the postwar economic boom’s expanded middle class, the prewar technology of the cathode ray tube, and the paucity of viewing choices in the precable television age, could and routinely did tune in to the same show.² It was this unusual and by no means inevitable confluence of factors—caused by, among other things, a series of missteps by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which was ill-equipped to regulate such a massive cultural and economic shift—that inaugurated what James L. Baughman calls the “republic of mass culture” and what Menand deems network television’s “empire” (116).³ For a brief moment that has now passed, network television ruled, and the result was mass culture.

      The emergence and temporary dominance of mass culture exerted itself powerfully on American novels, shifting the cultural and economic space they occupied as surely as television did to movies, magazines, and newspapers. But unlike these latter shifts, the story of postwar mass culture’s effects on novels has largely gone untold.⁴ These effects, which this book sets out to describe, are most easily—but still incompletely—seen in the stories told in the novels themselves. In the 1950s, numerous scholars have noted, novelists and contemporary critics turned their attention from the class issues that galvanized novelists of the 1930s to cultural and psychological concerns: disillusioned with radicalism in 1949, Lionel Trilling wrote, “Nowadays, it is no longer possible to think of politics except as a politics of culture” (xi), and Norman Mailer noted with disdain three years later in Partisan Review that “it has become as fashionable to sneer at economics and emphasize ‘the human dilemma’ as it was fashionable to do the reverse in the 1930s” (Advertisements 189).⁵ The novelistic effort to represent mass culture in the 1950s is one little-discussed example of this shift in focus. Throughout the decade, the emergence of mass culture provided novelists with a new topic not just to depict but also to critique, bemoan, and satirize. As the works I discuss in this book exemplify, such depictions are found not only in those novels that have dominated the critical conversation about