PYNCHON IN PULSE

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Steely sez:

> Obviously, Pynchon has no need to prove he can write a great novel. He's
> already written three of them. And if he can submit crap like Vineland,
> reap huge advances, have it land on the bestseller list (of all places), so
> much the better for him. Hell, he deserves that and more. But do you really
> believe that if you or me or even somebody like, say, the neglected Steve
> Erickson 

not available here - keep hearing of him

>     or the awesome Tom Maddox 

read a story called "Snake-Eyes" recently - pretty boring, pedestrian 
porridge, full of prime time TV cliches, I thought; maybe there's better 
stuff out there

>                           (though Maddox--who seems to labor along
> at Pynchonian speed--would never turn loose for public scrutiny anything as
> sloppily written as Vl) had packaged Vineland up in a grocery bag and sent
> it off by private courier to Little Brown, they'd've bought it?

who knows - they publish stuff today which is not just a waste of 
trees... 

> Jody concludes: "My perceptions of Pynchon's feelings for humanity as
> expressed in GR were reaffirmed in Vineland." No argument. But if that's
> all we're after wouldn't we be better served by reading the sermons of Desmond
> Tutu, the wonderful jailhouse diary of Ken Saro-Wiwa (murdered last year by
> the Nigerian military dictatorship at the behest of Shell--fucking--Oil) or
> the writings of Rigoberta Menshu?

are you trying to tell TRP which audience to write for?

> Of course, the reviews weren't all bad. That quick change artist, Salman
> Rushdie sent in a front page review for the NYT Book Review, praising
> Vineland for, among other things, its political content. Pynchon came home,
> Rushdie wrote, to write an accesible novel about what we've doing to our
> country, our politics, and our children these many years. But does Vineland
> really work as a political novel? If it does, it doesn't dig very deep into
> what was going on in the quarter century between Nixon and Ray-Gun.

it is _also_ a political novel, I think, but not just that, as with 
all TRPs stuff - like calling GR the best war novel since War and 
Peace, the best sf novel since Frankenstein, the best pm novel would 
be nowhere near summing it up

> Certainly it doesn't display the sophisticated political analysis you find
> in Robert Stone (A Flag
> for Sunrise), anything by Ward Just, Jayne Anne Phillips, Margaret
> Atwood, 

not bad, but falling into the "simplistic" category, like Oliver 
Stone, et al - not even close to what we find in Vineland

>        Carlos Fuentes (who, I've come to believe, is TRP's near equal, I
> mean check out a Change of Skin or Terra Nostra), John LeCarre, or even

John LeCarre? r u serius??

> Rushdie himself, whose incredible The Moor's Last Sigh has received nary a
> mention on this list--passed over, I guess, in favor of all the hype about
> that awful pretender DF Wallace.

not available here either; damn - any chance of anyone offering me a 
job in the good ol' US of A? I'll sweep floors, clean toilets - my 
speciality is pouring drinks, though....
 
> Maybe its all about fractals, afterall.

maybe, maybe not - what do you think it is all about, Steely?

> Steely

hg
PS. I may be way off, but it seems to me that you are under the 
impression that TRP has some kind of obligation to produce a certain 
kind of work; also, that you are labouring under the Chomskyan 
illusion that there is some kind of truth out there that is being 
kept from us, and that writers such as TRP should help us find - 
correct me if I'm wrong....
hag at iafrica.com