And Szalay builds his weakest chapter around a series of rather forced readings of ostentatiously "closed" or "hermetic" or "invulnerable" texts by Stein, Hemingway, and Rand.
McCann risks marring his otherwise convincing argument about Chandler, for example, when he finds in the writer's eagerness to "cannibalize" his earlier pulp stories for his "oddly shaped" novels a cultural figure for Franklin Roosevelt's contemporaneous calls on the Depressed public to "preserve and manage precious resources" (166). Both projects contribute to our evolving understanding of modernism as a complex set of strategies for comprehending the brave new world of the early twentieth century.Įach book suffers at times from the occasional strained homology, the willingness to shoehorn a writer or text into its critical framework. In Szalay's readings, that state's tracks take the shape of a new and self-conscious authorial professionalism, a distinctively performative aesthetic, and a range of metaphoric and textural manifestations of a newly actuarial worldview. Unbounded by genre, he analyzes texts by Jack London, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, John Steinbeck, Betty Smith, Robert Frost, Richard Wright, and Busby Berkeley, seeking in each case evidence of the New Deal's welfare state.
Michael Szalay surveys an apparently broader textual archive. He argues that the careers of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane, Ross McDonald, and Chester Himes stand as generic metonyms for the shifting relations between decentralized individualism and various discourses of state power. McCann finds in the hard-boiled crime story, whose rise coincides with the 1920s crisis in liberal assumptions, a form peculiarly attuned to the welfare state's displacement of the individual and development of social control.
Each of these books reads literary texts, that is, for the coded and complicated ways in which they dramatize and explore deep cultural conflicts or contradictions. These have their roots in new historicism, cultural materialism, and the "New Americanist" scholarship of Donald Pease, Walter Benn Michaels, and others. Sean McCann's Gumshoe America and Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism share not only a common period (roughly the late 1920s through the 1950s) and a common concern with the specific institutional formations of liberalism during the economic and political crises of the Depression but also a set of methodological and theoretical commitments.
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