big books (was re: Mcelroy)

[chris sweet]

Keith Brecher wrote:
> 
> At 10:22 AM 5/21/97 MDT, MATT FOLSOM FOR PRESIDENT 2032 wrote:
> >Who is this Joseph Mcelroy character?  Women and Men is HUGE!  Is he
> >in the same kinda vein as Pynchon?  Let me know, Matt
> >
> Dear Matt Folsom for President 2032--
> I'm glad you asked since I'm more than happy to tell you that Joseph
> McElroy is one of the great ones, though I don't think he's quite in the
> same vein as Pynchon, despite what the blurbs on his novels would have you
> believe. McElroy is often mentioned in the company of Gaddis, DeLillo, and
> Pynchon, but he's like them only in the sense that he might be considered
> "postmodern." Nobody out there, including those lame "avant-pop" novelists,
> is producing anything remotely as original as McElroy's three greatest
> novels LOOKOUT CARTRIDGE, PLUS, and WOMEN AND MEN. The only real similarity
> between McElroy and Pynchon is that both use serious science in their
> novels, though McElroy's is considerably more serious than Pynchon's.

There's a book called Visions of Excess by (I believe) Tom Leclair where
both GR and Men & Women are discussed along with 5 other books. I have
only
skimmed through it but it did look like there was some pretty serious
science
in the Men & Women section. Leclair's students are putting a web site
together
about 'big books'. The first section will be discussing A Frolic Of His
Own,
Mason & Dixon, and Underworld (Delillo's upcoming). Other sections
involve
many of the writers mentioned here of late: Vollmann, Wallace, Powers,
Franzen.
The site is called Prodigious Prose and its URL is:
http://ucunix.san.uc.edu/~sola/prodigious

-chris sweet