Idolatry

[Jules Siegel]

At 02:03 AM 05/15/97 -0400, MantaRay at aol.com wrote:

>I find it curious that one of the criticisms of Pynchon and DeLillo has
been this contamination of their prose by various media (ya listening Family
Jules?). I think THAT'S realist, eh? Life is dominated by various media;
White Noise has the best interrrogation of this assertion. A book
contaminated by media is one which I consider worthwhile and relevant.

I agree with this fully. Today's toilet paper wrapper will be hailed as one
of the most significant finds of the year 3872 when hyper-intelligent
cockroaches have evolved and inherited the earth. Think of their
speculations on the design, typography, the meaning of the fleur-de-lis
symbols and so on.

[Note: I am not comparing Pynchon's work to toilet paper here, in case
anyone is automatically reaching for his or her flamethrower.]

And they will be right. All graphic designers know this. That's what Andy
Warhol's work was all about: homage to graphic design. The Campbell Soup can
was great before he made it a painting. And Andy Warhol was just as great an
artist when he worked in an advertising agency as when he was selling
paintings to collectors and musueums.

Getting back to the discussion of reviews themselves, I think that reviewers
mostly display their own prejudices, tastes and political preferences
(whether literary, social or economic). The reviewer is often selected by
the publication for its own political reasons. About twenty years ago, New
York magazine asked me to review a book by Heywood Broun, a sports writer
and commentator. The book was really charming and had some profound and
moving observations about the politics of sports.

I wrote a very appreciative piece, which was rejected. When I asked the
editor, Rhoda Koenig, for an explanation, she said, "I thought you *hated*
sports." This didn't make sense to me. I was reviewing a book, not playing
stickball. A few days later, I came across a copy of The American Spectator
in which there was a lead essay on how these reviewers were all authors
themselves and buddies with authors and they were all being so kind to each
other's works and so on.

Get it? Murdoch reads Spectator and comments favorably to some New York
magazine top editor who passes the observations on in an editorial meeting,
perhaps. A reviewer is selected on the presumption that he will write a
slashing criticism based on the book review editor's background research on
his or her personal preferences.

[Note: I will appreciate a little polite silence on the issue of whether or
not the review was competently written or whether or not I am blowing my own
here and so on. It was competent. At my worst, I am a competent writer.]

I don't think reviews mean very much in an intellectual sense, although a
thoughtful review (whether positive or negative) can offer important
insights. My feeling about the Vidal review is that Gore Vidal could care
less about Thomas Pynchon, but his work provided a convenient target for
ideas Vidal wanted to express. Why even bother to reply? Why try to refute
the arguments? Why does anyone here care about reviews of Pynchon's work in
a political sense? His work stands on its own merits, and neither his sales
nor his reviews affect or measure those merits in any way at all.

I also want to say that I was one of Thomas Pynchon's first fans (before
some of you were born) and I even had a first edition of V. which he sent
me. When I use the word fan, I mean it exactly the way it sounds.

[Note: Again, please, no bandwidth-wasting accusations.]

Even as a fan, I don't have to like everything he writes. The only book I
really enjoyed was V., and it took a while for me to absorb it fully.
Appreciating Thomas Pynchon isn't a sign of high IQ or an intellectual
litmus test. It's merely a personal preference. I admire his success and I'm
glad he has a best seller. I do feel that he's very uneven as a writer and
it is absurd to expect every reviewer to like his work or even to be fair to
it. He has two press agents for that.

At present, I am interested in pynchon-l as an Internet phenomenon much more
than I am interested in Thomas Pynchon or his works, for reasons I have very
honestly described in previous messages. If I were a cunning manipulator I
would feign adoration in order to be a better observer. I would give up all
this reprehensible self-referential navel-watching and be a humble little
self-effacing spy. I now see that the list has 470 subscribers. It's the
smallest list by far to which I subscribe and the least influential in a
commercial sense, but it is the most interesting. When I want to promote
myself, I use the journalism lists and PR Newswire. When I want great
literary conversation and argument, I go to pynchon-l.

--
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