Slate (no spoilers)

[Bill Millard]

About that Slate review of M&D:

Ugh.  What a waste of electrons.  Like James Atlas's embarrassing
antimodernist screed in the NY Times Magazine a couple of months
ago, this review amounts to the whine of a lazy undergraduate: "this
stuff's just too hard for me."  No matter what the reviewer's actual 
age or attainments may be, he sounds like any one of thousands of
cookie-cutter philistines who go to college not to earn an actual
education (which makes demands, poses challenges, and forces people
to read things they might have to *think* about, oh my) but simply to
purchase a credential that will improve his social standing and
chances of upper-middle-class employment.  

It may sound undemocratic to say so, but there are people on whom 
the gravity and wildness and sheer joy of serious writing are lost.  
It's just surprising to find one of them reviewing a serious book in 
a publication intended for serious readers.

One passage alone shows any hint of higher cognitive function:

> Think about what's happened to the novel since the fat, fecund days
> of Gravity's Rainbow. It's grown thin and literal and modest, so
> much so that the typical first novel isn't called a first novel
> anymore; it's called a memoir, just one step from journalism, and
> it's immunized from conventional criticism by its traumatized
> sincerity. 

Right, but is this situation something to approve of?  Doesn't the 
reviewer see that this is the problem, a far-from-insignificant sign 
of cultural disease, and that Pynchon's erudition, complexity, 
ambition -- and, yes, humor (if the reviewer doesn't get the jokes, 
it's his limitation, not Pynchon's) -- are a large part of the cure?

A quick web search for this reviewer, Walter Kirn, reveals that his 
usual venue is GQ magazine; may he return swiftly and permanently to 
the lightweight topics and audiences for which his snotty, glib 
attitude is best suited.  I expected better from Slate.  

[I'm cross-posting this to Slate's "The Fray."  They earned the 
flame.]

--Bill

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Bill Millard, Editor
21stC: The World of Research at Columbia
millard at cuadmin.cis.columbia.edu
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fax 854-9476
online edition: www.21stC.org
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