Why Pynchon took the National Book Award (Plus Extra Bile!)

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

>Now, I don't care a whole lot about prizes.   I figure Pynchon cares even less
>than I do.  However, he's clearly proud of what he did, and he was a young
>writer in the era when people were trying to write The Great American Novel, 
>(does anyone aspire to that anymore?) and he was young enough to be susceptable
>to that kind of hype, so it's entirely possible that he at least got his
>hopes up.  The fact that the following year he (in turn) rejected the 
>Howell medal suggests two possibilities:  he would have also rejected
>the Pulitzer, or that he was pouting over the Pulitzer rejection.  I hate
>to say it, but I think the fact that he did accept the National Book
>award in '74 suggests the latter.  Only he knows for sure, and I'm pretty 
>sure he won't tell me.

   Well, actually not only Pynchon knows for sure. 
What happened was this.

 In theory, Mr. Pynchon did not want to take the prize,  because 
he does not and did not believe in the idea of the prize. 

However. 

He was not the only one being given the prize. IB Singer was 
also chosen in the same year. Thus Pynchon  accepted the prize
because not to accept would have been to diminish the value 
of what was being given to IB Singer, a writer and a man for 
whom Pynchon had enormous personal respect. 

A noble gesture, if not a Nobel jester.

    About this year's prizes. There have been some very good 
books published this year, and anyway some books by big names
(Roth, Pynchon, Mailer, Bellow, etc.)---more than any year in recent
memory. I would not be upset to see Roth get a prize---American 
Gothic is, I think, a damn good book, his best for ten years. 
It is, I believe, an achievement of lasting worth, along with his 
Zuckerman, Portnoy, Columbus.
But forgive me, for American Gothic is not an achievement on 
the scale of  Mason & Dixon.

 Pynchon is not, I think, flavour of the month at the moment 
with the Bullshit eaters and Horsedung spewers of the New Yorker
set. Why? Because They can't do what he does. Most trendy writers
are WAY too LAZY to ever spend the TIME and CARE that Mr P
does.
Not only can they not spare the time to write as he does, some
of them can not spare the time to read what he writes with reasonable
care. His care, scope, imagination, sheer ambition even, shames them 
in their hearts. So they reject his work, and will try I think to bury it. 
But it will not save THEM from the return of the repressed. 

For THEY are half-baked money-grubs, and their work, like a 
badly-made Apple Pie books, have a weak crust which falls apart 
on the fork..  The fruit they bear inside is both skimpy and nearly 
past its sell-by date. Mason & Dixon, however, is a Feast, and huge, 
varied, picnic table full of many riches, a spiralling table which winds 
its way about the whole garden of English letters and Anglo- American 
history. 

It is no snack. It is the Sacred Feast---and those 
addicted to Junk Food---making it, selling it, writing it, spiting it 
out secretly in dirty corners---offering prizes for it---watch out. 

This Mason & Dixon is wildly Organic, total Bio baby, and it will
be Rugged on the weak Junk systems.

           Mason & Dixon has a damn good claim to being the 
either the best or nearly the best American novel for---maybe five,
ten years? I will quite gladly eat my own shorts in a public place if
posterity proves me wrong. It is  probably also the best British
novel if one takes the wide view of this, removing the anti-US
blinders of the Booker's Prize's ridiculous bottom-feeding,
glad-handling, ill-literate, self-serving swine's breakfasts.

(Perhaps I am planning an all-out assault on the 
Booker Prize in a series of articles in various pubs next year. Or  
I might Just eat my shorts in the Groucho club instead, we'll see, hey? 
It would be better than their American Club Sandwich, I'll tell you 
that.)

As I say, I would not be upset to see Roth get a prize---American 
Gothic is, I think, a damn good book. As for Norm---I have to admit, although 
I did not like much Mailer has done in more than a decade, there was
something about The Gospel which I found very interesting, fresh,
and oddly smelly. It smacked of being a Stilton reply, in a way, to some of 
Joe Heller's more Cheddar work, and in a different way, perhaps even to some 
of Bellow's Table Crackers. 
I thought Heller's Closing Time last year---uneven, yes,
but pretty darn good. It had moments of powerful writing, sad, 
bleak even, but also funny, and full of simple truth.
And Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh was, well, it was as good
as a Salman Rushdie novel, and that is good enough for me.


This Cold Mountain thing, I don't know about it.
I have not read it, but I understand it is Very Big
in the US.  How good is it? Honestly. I would be interested 
to know.

Okay, here we go---hands up who thinks Nobel will come
to TRP one day, and he will reject it? What about the 
French Medal of Honour? Will he disown the EU's
support for IPW? At some point this becomes another
pretty amusing silly game for Midnight's lurkers to ponder.




Eric Alan Weinstein
University of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk