The Folderol of Fretful Peregrination

[s~Z]

Excerpt from Melvin Jules Bukiet's review of _The Royal Family_ in The
Nation magazine (Sept. 18/25):

A DREAM OF CALIFORNICATION

"Literature moves in an ascending trajectory from the Modernist
peregrinations through internal consciousness of Joyce, Proust and Woolf
into the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and then into a uniquely
contemporary crackpot realism exemplified by "world writers" like India's
Salman Rushdie, Israel's David Grossman, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk and Japan's
Haruki Murakami. They're not world writers merely because they're
foreign--au contraire. Rather than using literature to examine the world,
they use their world--or a quirky simulacrum thereof--to examine literature.
Their home is neither the steppe nor the prairie but the library. They write
in an international format that transcends locality and irks some critics,
who see them as navel-gazing, if occasionally brilliant, solipsists who
avoid the moral and emotional core of life that "ought" to be the proper
domain of the novel.

"These critics--reporters really--who disdain works not easily fact-checked
are wrong. What these writers are aiming at is not facts but truth.

"Among the Americans usually named as part of this cohort are the founding
fathers, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, and their literary offspring, David
Foster Wallace, Richard Powers and, the brattiest kid of all, William T.
Vollmann."

Richard Romeo might agree with the sentiment of the last words of the
review:

"I'll take him sentence for sentence over just about any writer in the
country, but not for sentence after sentence after sentence after sentence.
. ."