TRP and Gore Vidal

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

Vidal had a scurrilous, vituperous essay in the "New York Review" back in
1976 (July 15) called "American Plastic," which was an attack on the
postmodern fiction of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and of course TRP.
Vidal quoted several lines from an essay by Roland Barthes on "Plastic" to
the effect that plastics are of "flocculent appearance, something opaque,
creamy and curdled, something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant
smoothness of Nature."  He then applied this to TRP and Co., referring to
their writing as "plastic," as the artificial, unnatural product of English
Dept. R&D labs.  Only good thing he had to say about Pynchon was to praise
him backhandedly for not selling out by teaching creative writing.  Along
this ultra-critical line, that Vidal passage in "Duluth" about "Pynchon's
lesser corrollary" seems to be meant as sarcasm--a reference to Tyrone's
rocket-fall map, and to the fact that rockets fall later wherever Slothrop
has sex.  So even there, Vidal is nastily putting the screws to the truly
inventive, creative writers.

--Jeff Meikle