Pynchon, Gaddis, and rec.arts.books
Lukas Wagner
wagner at pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
Mon Jan 18 13:12:50 CST 1999
>From a thread now running in the newsgroup rec.arts.books:
>I've mentioned this before, but anyone who's interested in Vollman
>should have a look at http://oz.uc.edu/~sola/prodigious.htm. This
>site contains literate and thoughtful essays comparing and contrasting
>the works of Pynchon's literary descendents, namely Vollman, Richard
>Powers and David Foster Wallace. Anyone read Franzen, Shacochis or
>Dara, the other authors highlighted on the "Prodigious Prose" site?
>
Thanks for the URL.
I very much enjoyed Franzen's _The Twenty-Seventh City_.
It's a novel about an Indian (Delhi, not Dakota) police
chief who really shakes up a fictional St Louis, and the lives
of a handful of characters during the shakeup. The prose
is the same kind of new realism one finds in US short story
collections, but the novel is much more than a pastiche
of snapshots. I found it hard to put down. He gets
St Louis about right, too, I think. There's a melody
of (accurate, I thought) speculation about
the structure of modern American cities in the novel.
I think that Jane Jacobs would have liked this book.
Were I to enjoy taxonomies of novelists, Franzen wouldn't
be a branch of Pynchon. At all. About the only thing
they have in common is nation of birth and a certain respect
for history. Franzen has a sense of humor, but it's not
as exuberant or as silly as TP's bonghit rimshots. Franzen's
characters -- well, nothing against TP, but he doesn't really
write characters, it seems to me. There's none of the
fantastic layering of strange-but-maybe-true detail to
make a- what, a mosaic, a paper mache, a lurid diorama of
toy soldiers, whatever it is Pynchon's
novels are. Franzen's style is much more focused.
What about TC Boyle? _Road To Wellville_ shared a style
of humor with Pynchon, I thought, as well as having an
interest in history.
And another thing-- _The Recognitions_ predates _Gravity's Rainbow_
by about 15 years, I think. In style, _GR_ seems to reflect
Gaddis' influence pretty clearly. I don't know whether this is
a truism basically accepted by those who know both authors,
or a matter of controversy. I'd be very much interested in knowing
whether Pynchon read _The Recognitions_ prior to writing _GR_.
Does anyone know whether he did?
There exists, incidentally, a study of Gaddis' likely
reference material for _The Recognitions_:
AUTHOR: Moore, Steven, 1951-
TITLE: A reader's guide to William Gaddis's The recognitions /
Conversely, did Gaddis read _GR_ during or after _JR_?
Hmm. I think I'll post this to the gaddis and pynchon lists, also.
>Anyone know of mailing lists devoted to Vollman or Powers? Anyone
>want to start one? ;-) I have yet to read DFW and have been put off by
>the harsh criticism of _Infinite Jest_ here on r.a.b. How about _Girl
>with the Curious Hair_?
>
My wife enjoyed DFW's _The Broom of the System_, though she didn't
love it to death. _IJ_ is pretty frothy, has funny passages,
and an interesting, if extremely harsh, take on 12-step groups.
One chapter is clearly a short story stuffed into the novel, the
footnotes and alternate reality stuff are infantile, I thought.
Were that to be excised, one would be left with a nice novel
with half the mass of the actual tome.
http://www.liszt.com is where I go to look for listservs, by the way.
>--
>Alison Chaiken <alison+gnus at spam.free.or.die.wsrcc.com>
>(650) 236-2231 [daytime] http://www.wsrcc.com/alison/
>1976: swine flu...................................................1999: Y2K.
-Lukas Wagner
wagner at pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
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