Can't we all just get along ...

[Dave Monroe]

... well, while Gravity's Rainbow is my favorite novel of all time, and The
Crying of Lot 49 (which I've probably reread more than any other book I've ever
read in the first place) isn't far behind, I've no problem with others not quite
sharing my enthusiam, have, indeed, come to expect it, and, certainly, can
understand it.  And I'd be a bit timid about putting it up against, say, James
Joyce's Ulysses or Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov or Cervantes' Don
Quixote, for that matter, but ... and, while I'd certainly consider Pynchon to be
the greatest novelist, in English, at least (Gabriel Garcia Marquez being at
LEAST a contender on the international "scene") of our moment--esp. of our
moment--I can see a case at LEAST for Salman Rushdie.  Not that I want to argue
said cases, but ... and, as far as the "Great American Novel" goes, the "Great
American Novelist," well, my take on that is to take into consideration time and
place, not to mention the fact that, typically, said Great America Novel/ist/s
have not typically been considered as such in their times and places ... Herman
Melville, Moby Dick ... Henry James, The Ambassadors ... F. Scott Fitzgerald, The
Great Gatsby ... William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ... Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow ... (Hawthorne? Cooper? Hemingway? Bellow? Updike? er ...) ...
there might even eventually be case to include, say, Don DeLillo, Underworld in
that litany, that lineage some day, but ... at any rate, no, it doesn't do
anybody, any author, any commentator, any work, any good to merely praise
it/her/him with platitudes or to demean it/her/him with insults ... though I did
rather appreciate that third sense of "hagiography" introduced above, very
applicable, indeed ...

MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> Mud, chalk, cats, turds, kicking, slamming ...  and this odd idea that the
> p-list is a living room.  What is all that?
>
> At any rate, if suggesting that Pynchon might sit a rung below Faulkner
> strikes Millison as "slams against Pynchon" and "slinging mud" -- he makes my
> point re hagiography for me.
>
> And he sure does keep things lively!