DFW on NPR

[Keith Brecher]

At 10:01 AM 5/20/97 -0400, Paul York wrote:
>Just wondering if anyone else heard DFW on NPR (I think it was on 
>Weekend Edition)....

I didn't, but thanks for bringing up DFW's problem with TRP comparisons. I
had a first hand encounter with this problem at a rather lame DFW reading
at Barnes & Noble in Kenmore Square. The reading was far better attended
than Robert Coover's JOHN'S WIFE reading--the latter of which featured an
irate crazy lady who berated Coover for wasting her time with pornographic
fiction--thanks mostly to Chris Lydon's publicity on NPR. During the
obligatory book signing, I gently suggested to DFW that there might be the
merest hint of TRP influence in IJ and the long-tressed wunderkind became
moderately pissed off and, remembering it now, nearly as irate as that
crazy lady at the Coover reading. DFW informed me that I was wrong and that
TRP had no influence on IJ. 
   This, of course, is bullshit. Placing DFW on the couch for a moment, it
seems likely that he suffers from that peculiar malady called the anxiety
of influence somewhat prevalent among post-postmodern writers, though never
so severe as in the case of poor DFW. 
It is very hard to believe that as IJ passed 700 pages, DFW didn't chuckle
evilly to himself and soliloquize about writing his generation's GR.
Though, whether that ever happened or not, IJ speaks and speaks and speaks
for itself, which is to say that the only thing great about it is its
length, the unwarranted megalomania of its author, and its sheer inertial
mass. IJ makes a great doorstop, but, to extend that old metaphor about
eating books, reading it is like eating a cinderblock...two cinderblocks,
in fact. 
   TRP's influence is very obvious in DFW's horrible first novel THE BROOM
OF THE SYSTEM, only notable for DFW's botched attempt at TRP-style
scientific erudition which resulted in somebody getting a dose of 200 cc of
Thorazine. Just imagine how big that syringe would be...DFW apparently
didn't. He certainly went to the PDR a few times for IJ, which is a relief,
but that still doesn't compensate for the rest of IJ's unmemorable mass.
The only TRP-type thing in IJ that comes to mind right away, besides the
fact that its entire post-paranoid parenchyma couldn't exist without TRP
first establishing the paradigm, is a scene creating shadows on a mountain
that reminded me of the brockenspecter in GR.
    With regard to DFW in general, most unforgivable of all is an idiotic
and nasty comment he made about another long book, Joseph McElroy's WOMEN
AND MEN, a truly great novel whose length has a purpose other than merely
being long for the sake of being long (which seems to be the central reason
for IJ's existence). If there's one novel that bears comparison to GR as
its equal, it's WOMEN AND MEN. In fact, it may even be greater.

Keith