These days, when sampling newly published works of American fiction, one often feels less like a reader than like a psychoanalyst. One feels, in other words, as if one is witnessing a confession of the writer’s own personal history—or, at least, some semi-imaginative variation upon it—and is expected to respond with commentary, advice, or words of sympathy. That many of these new works are written in the first person does little to dispel this impression. This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong, per se, with autobiographical fiction. After all, such distinguished works as Remembrance of Things Past and The Sun Also Rises are heavily autobiographical (and written in the first person, to boot). But these novels represent highly accomplished acts of artistic distancing, of self-objectification; at the end of each of them one feels not merely that one has rummaged around inside a single confused soul, but that one has been vouchsafed an artist’s vision of the world.

Many a novel and short-story collection nowadays, by contrast, seems confessional in the worst—the most desperate and claustrophobic—sense of the word. In such a work, the writer’s main purpose typically appears to be less artistic than personal: he may seek, variously, to delineate his deepest emotions, to expiate his guilt, to prove his innocence, to account for his failures or weaknesses or neuroses. The real subject of the “fiction,” accordingly, consists less often in the events of the narrative themselves than in the protagonist’s feelingsabout those