Gaddis and Pynchon

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<If not Gaddis, who are the novelists that can carry TRP's pocket 
protector?>>

Tobylevy:  <<Writing today?  None.

I have read thousands of books since I first read V. in 1965.  I have sung 
the praises of many great contemporary authors to whoever would listen.  But 
I have TO THIS DAY not found one living author who combines the intelligence, 
wit, compassion and skill of Thomas Pynchon. I have not found even one who 
comes close!>>

Apparently reading "thousands" of books is no guarantee that one will, 
thereby, acquire a critical sensibility worth hearing from.

Nabokov?  Saul Bellow?  Philip Roth?  Gunther Grass?  Heinrich Boll?  
Garcia-Marquez?  

(Nabokov and Boll are dead but, since Gaddis is also, I trust you meant to 
include them as contemporary, "since 1965."  Samuel Beckett was alive after 
1965; so was Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh, to name a few 
others who, unfortunately, barely approximate Pynchon's wit, intelligence, 
and skill.)

Do playwrights count?  Tom Stoppard?  Harold Pinter?    

Not even close.  
  
There are things Pynchon does well and things he does not so well.  (Creating 
three-dimensional characters, comes to mind.)  And writers have their ups and 
downs, certainly, but I can't think of a novel by any of the above as 
thoroughly dreary and mediocre as Vineland.  Some early Roth, perhaps, but 
nothing he's written since 1980.  

And "wit"?  I suppose, if one finds Colonial valley girls witty or giving 
characters names like "Cherrycoke" (hardy-har).  That one struck the master 
as so good, he used it twice.  I'm sure Evelyn Waugh would have too, had he 
possessed the wit to have thought of it.

Millison:  <<I guess you know that some folks on Pynchon-L, for reasons that 
escape me, get anxious around such expressions of unadulterated adulation for 
Pynchon. >>

Millison has given no indication I can recall that he's ever read Gaddis.  
Other than rereading Pynchon, He seems to read little other than internet 
postings.  No wonder the reasons escape him.

There is no "anxiety"; just an attempt to maintain some perspective amongst 
the hagiographers.