GRGR Pynchon on Pynchon (was Slothrop & Sloth)

[Derek C. Maus]

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999 MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> His "essay" on Love in the Time of Cholera was, in fact, a review of the 
> novel written for that same NY Times Book Review.  I.e., a newspaper 
> assignment.  Millison might have mentioned interviews with rock bands and 
> readily supplied blurbs for the back covers of good, mediocre, and egregious 
> novels (e.g., Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).

I guess this means that Salman Rushdie and John Updike must be living a
hand-to-mouth existence these days too...or could it be that publishers
send review copies of *every* new novel that comes out with any literary
pretension to an established cadre of authors for possible blurbing?
 
Having personally catalogued at my old bookstore job about 100 second-hand
review copies that (if the signature is to be believed) belonged to
Updike, I don't really see the idea of these pieces being free-lance
newspaper work. I mean, Rushdie didn't review Vineland to have drinking
money did he? Presumably, Bono wasn't charging him rent. Having
free-lanced before, I don't se Pynchon needing to grovel for piece-work.
"Sorry, Tom, I had to cut a couple of paragraphs. Let's see, that works
out to 500 words at 16 cents a word...here's your eighty bucks."

I personally *like* the fact that he does blurbs and occasional articles,
if only because he's not a writer who has a lot of extraneous stuff out
there. I have a hard time not seeing his non-fictional writing as at least
hinting at his personal opinions about things, although the Joyce example
is warranted evidence of not taking non-fiction at its word.

Speaking of which, did anyone read the article in the NEW YORKER about the
apparent hoax created by Binjamin Wilkomirski in writing a supposed
Holocaust memoir called FRAGMENTS? I read the book when it came out a
couple of years ago and found it to be incredibly powerful *as a personal
account* of suffering. I'm going to go back and read it again this
afternoon to see if it reads powerfully as a piece of fiction, which it
now apparently has become. Do the categories muddle the message, or was
there never a message?

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Derek C. Maus               |   "Don't go around saying the world
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |      the world owes you a living.
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |       The world owes you nothing.
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |          It was here first."
                            |                  --Mark Twain
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