Cheever is Cheever, no matter what the year. And, in any case, there have been Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter and Hortense Calisher and Margaret Laurence and Iris Murdoch and Grace Paley and Lillian Hellman. Rereading Colette in recent weeks I have been struck by the reticence of her work as well as by its stylistic precision. As an admirer of Proust she would have been contemptuous of the sort of writing in the 70's that pretends to be descended from or in some way related to her own work. But perhaps not necessary.
Literature is the result of individual writers working individually.
It can have no genuine unity save in the minds of critics and journalists. Liberated, perhaps, by the passage of time from their bondage to one another. In art the individual is everything, the collective nothing. By scanning the horizon and seeing only the obvious, one in fact sees very little.