Holt PR

[Steelhead]

Grant White (who quotes one of the few great living poets--Seamus
Heaney--who I know believes that the story is at least as important as the
way it is told) chastizes me:

>At 09:58 3/12/96 -0700, Steelhead wrote:
>>The Henry Holt Press Release may well have been written by Pynchon. But it
>>sounds to me like it was written by John Barth--or perhaps one of his grad
>>students. Indeed, the novel is beginning to sound more and more like Barth
>>circa the Sotweed Factor. And I'm wondering, why go to the trouble? I mean
>>really.
>>"re-imagined," "updated version,"
>
>But that's what it's all about.
> Pynchon and Barth have got more in common than you think; the reiteration
>of a variety of tropes is one of the big ones.

If "that's what it's all about," I think Henry Holt may have over-ordered
the number of initial print runs of M&D by about 150,000. Fortunately, I
don't think TRP has sunk to the level of Ronald Sukenek (or however you
spell his name). I've known TRP and Barth have had a lot in common for
about 20 years. But Pynchon has been saved by distancing himself from
academics. Barth has been--to use his own phrase--exhausted by them. The
vampires.

The "reiteration of tropes" hardly seems like anything "big" to me. Sounds
like mindless fodder for a Phd thesis. But why should a novelist spend much
time writing about such things, except satirically.

> What makes Pynchon better, in my humble opinion, is the degree of
>imagination he uses within the "re-imagination" of  things.  Setting the
>scope of the novel within such a tight frame means that the imagination has
>to be extra sharp to work within it and make something meaningful and
>deliberate out of what would otherwise be stale.

I don't like Barth all that much, but the Sotweed Factor was hardly stale.

>Its the way the story is told, not the story itself which makes the difference.

This attitude is precisely why we are living in the age of literary
exhaustion. It's propounded as if it is some new notion, but it's as old as
Boccaccio. Only Boccaccio told better stories than most of the writers who
tout this nonsense.

Steely