Gore's rosebud

[Craig Clark]

Rodney Welch writes:
 
> Steven Maas (Oedipa's brother, presumably) tells us that 
> Gore Vidal -- who is only the greatest literary essayist alive, fer 
> Chrissakes -- doesn't really have a right to an opinion on 
> Pynchon... Not to be outdone, a Mr. Craig Clark chimes in with his 
> opinion, based on reading one book and browsing another, that Gore Vidal
> isn't up to Pynchon's level, either. 

> Let's get some intelligence on the table, shall we?

Good idea... So Vidal's entitled to HIS opinion, whereas I'm not, 
hmmm? I'm tempted to ask, based on what has been reported on this 
list about Vidal's opinions of Pynchon, just how much Pynchon Vidal has 
read and understood. Certainly to dismiss Pynchon because his work 
requires disciplined and informed reading, of the kind usually (but not 
exclusively) associated with the academy, suggests that Vidal hasn't come 
fully to grip with the force of Pynchon's critique of contemporary society. It 
is the essence of that critique that the world we live is complex and 
multiple-layered (with the crucial decisions which affect us all 
being taken at levels deliberately concealed from plain sight). Therefore complex
and multiple-layered readings (such as those associated, though not 
exclusively, with the academy) are essential.

Pynchon's literary status surpasses Vidal's, IMHO, because Vidal has 
failed, to the best of my knowledge, to produce fictions which convey 
this same sense of the complexity of the world. I am not wholly ignorant
of contemporary literature, US or otherwise, and though I concede that my 
experience of Vidal is limited, I suspect that my search for complex multiple-layered 
fictions would have led me to Vidal before now, were he the author of any such.
I stand ready to be corrected, however. In my library I have (unread) copies of 
_Myra Breckenridge_ and _Messiah_. Any other Vidal titles I should read, ones
which will give me a reading experience comparable to that produced by _Gravity's 
Rainbow_, _V._, De Lillo's  _The Names_, Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_, Joyce's 
_Ulysses_?



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"