by Bliss Kern
Everyone knows that too many novels are published each year. I've read that one is released about every hour, which leaves even the fastest and most dedicated reader woefully unable to keep up with the market. One consequence of this deluge of words has been the development of a range of services targeted at letting each reader sift through the vast list of titles to find those must appreciated by others like them: Amazon comments; virtual, physical, and TV book clubs; Shelfari; endless new book review blogs, written by professionals and amateurs alike. By necessity, every reader has become an advocate, choosing novels we love and recommending them to others so that the stories that impressed us don't get lost in the textual flood. This constant need to listen to others to find our new favorites and to regularly champion them to others compels self-consciousness about our own literary tastes. I can now reel off a list of twelve of my favorite works of contemporary fiction without even thinking because their names are a cultural currency, invoked in all kinds of exchanges. I am of course not the only one. I recognize this habit in my friends and colleagues as well. While looking for common ground among us I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: a disproportionate number of the contemporary novelists about whom my demographic (urban, young thirties, educated) are excited are Jewish American. Is there some common thread among these texts that speaks to us? A new trend has developed in Jewish American fiction, one that holds out the universally tantalizing hope of integrating all of our complex cultural inputs into a single functional, even exciting, individual. Recent Jewish fiction has hit on the ability to describe exactly what it feels like to be that mythic creature: a modern American.