progression

[Kelleher99 at aol.com]

On May 5 Sean K. wrote:

"I assume, from reading the intro to Slow Learner (easily the best part of
the book)  that what's-his-face doesn't like to look back at his old work
because it's not going  to be as good as he could make it now.  I find that I
don't like to look at a story I had published while in college because now I
could write it that much better.  What's-his-face probably looks at V. and
sees a story he could do that much better now that he has thirty more years
of growth and experience under his belt."

Oh, yes.  Hope I didn't seem to suggest any personal disrespect for that
novel -- certainly none intended.  That someone could write V. at any age,
let alone 24ish, is downright freaking scary and mind-numbing.  And how
rewarding to be able to see, post-Walpurgisnacht 1997, what a former enfant
terrible can now do to entertain us (actually, probably to entertain himself)
-- the path the progression has taken.  From my idiosyncratic (?idiotic)
vantage, that progression includes but is not limited to:
The slippery (non-?)distinction between animate and inanimate (V.); the more
general slippery (non-?) distinction between meaning and randomness (CoL49);
just about (to keep it brief) every slippery distinction or nondistinction
there is (GR -- which has the ring of a last word on some sort of subject);
--

and then a breather, in which we might note the closing words of Philip
Morison's review of GR for Scientific American -- "...but its heart is icy
cold."  This is _Scientific American_ talking, people! --

and then a move -- not into the normative really, yet somewhere past the
exhaustive-descriptive:  the overtly karmic entanglements of Vineland, and
the rich spiritual speculation virtually suffusing M&D (not offering any
answers of course, that's not what this is about -- it suffices to wonder
about our place under and amidst all those stars).  This is a deeply
satisfying progression to behold, undergone by a unique mind.


By the way -- has anyone noticed (I'm on p. 250, and this is no spoiler) the
occurence of a certain six-letter adjective on almost every third page of M&D
-- one that does not seem to have been singled out for such frequent use in
his prior work?  (Although it does have frequent enough application to large
chunks of it...)

j.k.