Rob Turner opens his “Introduction” to Counterfeit Culture: Truth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic since 1960 with Charles Dickens, whose complaints about the pirating of his work by American publishers are all too well known. In his contention that, as Turner writes, “relying on piracy” means that “the young nation ‘will have no literature of its own’” (4), Dickens also identifies an inherent opposition embedded within American literature and culture that continues to this day: the tension between the authentic/inauthentic and the real/counterfeit. Turner observes that this opposition is explored by others, including Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky in “The Early American Novel.”Footnote ¹ But while both Trilling and Rubin-Dorsky suggested a kind of authenticity that might ultimately emerge, Turner instead offers “the possibility that inauthenticity, and the conscious counterfeit, might become a dominant American mode” (7). Going beyond prior studies that focussed on works published between 1880 and 1930, Turner examines “a series of experimental prose works” produced since 1960 that “break the generic parameters of the ‘American novel’” (9). The result is a provocative analysis of what he refers to as the “prose epic,” using a term coined by Catherine Morley (10).Footnote ²

In five carefully crafted chapters, Turner explores the ways each text or text series, while ostensibly engaged in the kind of detailed world building that has traditionally been associated with the authentic in fiction – filled with facts, details, and history – actually signifies the impossibility of that project. The starting point for the prose epic in American literature, Melville's Moby-Dick, which has gained the status of national epic, is also the touchstone for Turner's analysis of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the longest American novel published to date and the subject of his first chapter. Turner argues that Young's novel, representing a “new aesthetic of authenticity” (195), in fact stands as “a vast illustration of what Melville called ‘the yawning gulf of meaninglessness’” (39). In truth, the same could be said for each of the epics Turner discusses. For example, both Andy Warhol's a: a novel and William Gaddis's JR are products of an age in which Emerson's fear of a novel-writing machine has seemingly come to pass, with text generated by a variety of mechanical means (tape recorders, typewriters, the punched paper roll of a player piano), any of which can be manipulated and corrupted. As Turner explains, in these texts “the ‘Machine’ that Emerson so dreaded has been rewired and turned to literary ends, pawning a new breed of literary text, books that open lines of inquiry into the challenge of recording consciousness, and exploring the ways in which the novel can ‘interrogate and store data’” (77). Conversely, Turner reads William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy, created using the cut-up method, as “an attempt to incorporate an array of state-of-the-art tools to refashion the abundance of what the Russian critic [Viktor Shklovsky] would dub ‘counterfeit’ prose, restoring radical linguistic unfamiliarity to the otherwise ‘second class’ novel form” (83). Further complicating questions of authenticity is the ordering of the trilogy; generally understood to conclude with Nova Express, Turner makes a compelling case for The Ticket That Exploded as the final volume, thereby producing an additional level of textual uncertainty.

In chapter 4, Turner examines the work of Thomas Pynchon, whose “task,” as he understands it, is “adding to the [historical] record, seeking to forge an alternative America from ‘the waste’” (111). In pursuit of this goal, Pynchon uses a “cumulative method” that “involves importing masses of material from mountains of cultural trash, ranging from music hall song … to exploitation cinema” (111–12). The result, evident in novels such as Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, is works that challenge their own counterfeit nature and undermine our understanding of that very concept.

William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams cycle, “A survey of American history (and pre-history) spanning over a thousand years” (150), is a fitting culmination to the volume. Unlike his predecessors, however, Vollman actively pursues the authentic, although the term itself is open to interpretation. Based on historical texts, some of which are themselves inauthentic, and making use of a variety of narrative techniques, Vollman's cycle resonates with many of the texts that preceded it: there are echoes of the player piano in Gaddis's JR, the historical interests of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, the problems of mechanical transcription in Warhol's a: a novel, and the sheer length and breadth of Young's Miss MacIntosh. In fact, one of the strengths of Turner's study is the way it connects prior texts to subsequent ones, tracing lines of correspondence that speak to a shared sensibility, and a shared ambivalence as well. In text after text, the reader's understanding of the authentic and the counterfeit is challenged, so that at certain points the counterfeit becomes almost authentic by virtue of its faithfulness to its very inauthenticity.

Turner's “Conclusion” lays the groundwork for further study, pointing to a contemporary “turn to truth” that is evident in current fiction, but even that comes with its price. Considering Vanessa Place's Tragodia and Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity, he concludes, “While some form of factual ‘Truth’ may well exist for most contemporary authors,” it can also be “a wounding force, carelessly disseminated, and ultimately branded onto human beings themselves” (197).

This is an essential study for anyone interested in the prose epic and in the development of American fiction in the last fifty years. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, it illuminates these expansive and complex texts while also making a compelling case for our ongoing national fascination with the authentic and the counterfeit.