Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

"James Wood, the very smart and very grouchy literary
critic for The New Republic, has become increasingly
exasperated with those enormous, encyclopedic novels
like The Corrections  that contemporary writers keep
churning out. These show-offy books -- all longer than
Ulysses and teeming with zany-yet-brilliant characters
whose improbably interlocked stories are punctuated by
smarty-pants digressions on arcane topics like
earthquake detection, Quebecois exceptionalism and the
semiotics of hot-dog stands -- are, Wood says,
'perpetual motion machines' that are 'ashamed of
silence' and pursue 'vitality at all costs.' He has
even coined a damning phrase for the genre:
'hysterical realism.'  In hyperdrive novels like David
Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's
Mason and Dixon, Wood complains, 'the conventions of
realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary,
exhausted and overworked.'  In other words, today's
novelists suffer from the literary equivalent of
attention-deficit disorder, and it's way past time for
the Ritalin. "

from: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15HYST.html
Hysterical Realism
by Daniel Zalewski
New York Times, 15 December 2002



...enjoy!

-Doug


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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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