This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.
I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.
I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
I never thought I wanted to write about the '50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.
As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.
And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.