Pynchon, Gaddis, and rec.arts.books

[Lukas Wagner]

>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