How does Gore's rose bud?

[Charles_Sligh at BAYLOR.EDU]

Paul Mackin is on target.  "Plastic Fiction" is the title of the essay--Vidal's 
reviews and criticism have been "collected" at least three times--check any 
volume after the mid seventies.

Paul is correct in pointing out Vidal's strange "complimentary and damning" 
remarks, but I disagree that Vidal "has nothing else good to say about Pynchon."   
Sure, Vidal will never be a Pynchon-booster, but there is a clear change in the 
tone of the essay once the focus shifts to TRP.  Vidal seems to suggest that TRP 
cannot be dismissed like the other "academic" novelists--check out the equally 
poetic hieroglyph at the essay's end:  "O."

For different reasons than he or Vidal _perhaps_ intended, I think Paul's quote 
is well-chosen:

 "It is curious to read a work that excites the imagination but disturbs the 
aesthetic sense." (referring to GR)

I find Vidal's comment on TRP's "disturbing aesthetic" admirably captures the 
reading experience of _GR_--I can't pretend that to read the big book is not to 
become the reader-as-displaced-person.

I will concede that Vidal's verdict on Pynchon's writing in comparison to 
Joyce's--something like (no text here) "as preposterous as comparing the writing 
of a graduate student to a gradeschooler"--cannot be defended.  Too cheap a shot 
for Vidal to take--these authors are after different things in their style.  And  
Vidal is too strong and interested as a reader to make this reamrk--his reviews 
of Calvino and open regret for letting Burroughs's _Naked Lunch_ fall short of  
an award for which he was a voting panel member show that he is not blind in his 
appreciation of new forms of fiction.

Additionally, Pynchon and Gore both seem to see or at least previously have seen 
themselves as "Sons of Henry Adams"--becuase he sees parallels between the 
decline of great American political dynasties, Vidal betrays a continual 
obsession with Adams.

Thanks for the correct title, Paul!