Why Quentin = Baker

[WillL at fieldschool.com]

Why Quentin = Baker
To pynchon-l at sfu.ca


Yesterday, Anne Thalheimer wrote:

"I like Pynchon a whole lot more than Baker; I don't think
you could pair 
the two up, especially after VOX.  Yuck.  I'm interested in
why you chose 
Baker."

This was in response to my post:

". . . is to Tarentino as
Pynchon is to . . . Nicholson Baker (he of VOX and THE
FERMATA)"

Anne, my post contained that first elipsis because I
couldn't remember the original challenge, but it went
something like this:  "Goddard [or was it Kubrick or Welles
-- that's what I can't remember!] is to Tarentino as Pynchon
is to . . . ?"

Various folks on the list had suggested ending this SAT-like
analogy with Mark Leyner (good choice, IMHO), Brett Easton
Ellis (for me, just as exploitive as Nicholson Baker without
a smidge of Baker's sense of form) and maybe David Wallace.

Anyway, I put forth Baker because he reminds me of
Tarentino.  I liked PULP FICTION, but but so much of what QT
has been involved with since then (this current
bad-guys-meet-vampires movie and his TV directing slumming
<ER>, for example) is all style and no substance and
reasonably exploitive to boot.  Like Tarentino, Baker seems
like a talented and ambitious writer who, whether by design
or by weird marketing chance, stumbled onto quasi-literary
popularity through titillation.  When something like that
happens, you hope that it will mean that the person's next
book -- now guarenteed a bigger audience -- will be
terrific.  Alas, Quentin and Nicholson seem to have followed
up their noteriety with "wink-wink"
I'm-more-talented-than-this-but-it's-fun-to-slum-and-make-a-llittle-dough
projects.  I guess I'm thinking that Nabokov (from LOLITA to
 . .) and Philip Roth (from PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT to . . .)
resisted the temptation.

Anyway, the point wasn't to equate or campare Pynchon and
Baker but to say that Baker is to Pynchon as Tarentino is to
somebody like Orsen Welles or Stanley Kubrick.

-- Will Layman