trend alert: the "maximalist" novel & Pynchon mention

[Doug Millison]

Delillo mentioned and Pynchon ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/books/review/18MCLEMET.html

"The minimalist fiction once fostered by creative-writing programs -- with
its miniature profiles in anemic anomie -- is dead, perhaps of exhaustion.
The future belongs to M.F.A. maximalism: fiction that sprawls, with
narratives as complex as the page can bear, its story lines branching out
across whole continents or eons (preferably both). The cast of characters
is huge and densely interconnected; as many as possible will be allegorical
figures, often bearing funny names. The saga is to be rendered in prose
having the texture and intricacy of a circuit board, with all metaphors
ultimately deriving from esoteric fields of knowledge. (The maximalist
author may have studied quantum mechanics or Renaissance poetry in graduate
school. Failing that, there's always Google.) No writer of ambition can be
satisfied with quiet epiphanies now, when the soundtrack of our lives
throbs with so many layers of noise. Where Raymond Carver was, David Foster
Wallace shall be. [...]
The frequent jumps between story lines are, presumably, the surface effect
of Gloria's command of the message pathways -- scrambling, as it were, the
novel's egg code. (My hunch is that Gloria's foremother was the enigmatic,
unlocatable yet pervasive ''V'' of Thomas Pynchon's first novel.) [...]

from

titled:
'The Egg Code': A Maximalist Novel Zigzags Across the Technosphere
By SCOTT McLEMEE


a review of

THE EGG CODE
By Mike Heppner.
462 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

first chapter at
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/books/chapters/0818-1st-heppn.html

"That's all right." She smiled, feeling sexy as she put her watch back on
in front of the guard. "I love getting frisked," she said. "It's better
than having a husband."