In The Terrible Twos Reed is supposedly outside of history; he sets his story in 1990, when the President is a former male model, the economy is worse than ever, and all that's left to trickle down is Christmas, which a bunch of power-hungry goons who run the country successfully buy and sell. God Made Alaska for the Indians, on the other hand, assembles eight essays and an afterword on environmentalists, Native Americans, literary politicians, prize fight promotions, male sexuality, race relations, the troubles in Ulster as seen by Irish-Americans, and the problems of multicultural artists—all of which deal directly with the demoralizing state of events since 1976. But with Reed in control there's no real difference in subject or method, and the result is a penetrating vision which by now surely ranks as the new decade's most insightful literary critique of American morals and manners.
It's at this intersection that the battle over Reed's work is fought: can the identity of history and imagination, just because our age apparently confuses them, be a valid method for the critique itself? For years Reed has been complaining about the intellectual colonialism which judges American literature by nineteenth century English and European standards—"all those books in rusty trunks," as he puts it, which by contrast make his own writing seem "muddled, crazy, and incoherent." In his attack on these old-order standards Reed does disrupt some emotionally-held ideals, but his genius is to base his method solidly within the multicultural American lower-middle class, which he claims is more ready to allow "the techniques and forms painters, dancers, film makers, and musicians in the West have taken for granted for at least fifty years, and the artists of other cultures for thousands of years." Hence you'll find Reed talking about (and writing like) Cab Calloway, who since 1928 has never lacked a lowbrow audience, black or white, rather than the intellectually uptown musicians conventionally taken as models….
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