Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_12.26.02/arts/yir-books.html

Year of the mouthy author 

BY ANDRE MAYER 


Writers are, for the most part, a quiet bunch. They
think a lot and work in solitude. Unlike other celebs,
they don't generally use the media to sound off. If
they have something to get off their chests, they'd
sooner weave it into their next novel. 

Not so this year. Maybe it's this era of disclosure
that we're in -- thanks to reality TV and various
accounting scandals -- because writers were all over
the news in 2002. 

The American literary community let out a collective
gasp in July, when Dale Peck lambasted The Black Veil,
Rick Moody's digressive memoir, in the pages of The
New Republic. It's exciting when one writer sees fit
to disparage another's work, but this was personal.
Peck opened the review with the statement "Rick Moody
is the worst writer of his generation." Granted, Moody
abhors conventional narratives and is given to all
manner of cutesy tangents. The "most verbose writer,"
I can see. But the worst? 

As it turned out, Peck's tirade 
wasn't so much about The Black Veil -- although he
really, really hates Moody's writing -- as the entire
postmodern oeuvre, which he considers pretentious and
self-indulgent. Peck's review attacked Pynchon and
Gaddis. He pilloried Nabokov and Faulkner. He even had
some choice words for Joyce (one of them was
"diarrheic"). 

Peck isn't entirely misguided. Meta-fiction can
sometimes feel like the literary equivalent of the
guitar solo -- masturbatory, self-consciously clever
and tedious for everyone but the perpetrator.
(Thankfully, Dave Eggers' new novel, You Shall Know
Our Velocity, doesn't come with a tedious appendix of
corrections, as did the paperback edition of his last
book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.)
Although invigorating, Peck's review was little more
than a hissy fit. The author of three novels of modest
renown, Peck was simply looking to be put on the
literary map. Somewhere near Siberia seems
appropriate. 

Thesaurus junkie Will Self -- the sort of chap who
uses words like "sesquipedalian" in normal
conversation -- showed Pecklike candour in the run-up
to the Mann Booker Prize nominations. He dismissed the
nominees this year -- and all previous years -- as
"bland" and ignorant of "the most influential
novelists in modern U.K. society." The likes of Martin
Amis and J.G. Ballard, he argued, are routinely
snubbed. Self was no doubt rallying some votes for his
own novel, Dorian, a contemporary reworking of Oscar
Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. He has a point,
but why does a transgressive writer like Self even
give a toss about a populist prize like the Booker? 

Self made no public statements about the winning novel
-- Life of Pi by Canada's Yann Martel -- although I
suspect he acted out of envy. The Booker win has
certainly prolonged the shelf life of Pi: Martel's
British publisher, Canongate Books, expects to sell
80,000 to 100,000 copies of the hardcover edition and
another million when it appears in paperback. Now
imagine sales if Martel hadn't been accused of
plagiarism. 

In terms of controversy, no one did it better this
year than Michel Houellebecq. First, he won the IMPAC
prize, the world's largest literary score (100,000
Euros, or about $160,000, which he shares with his
translator) for his controversial novel Atomised
(published in Canada as The Elementary Particles),
deemed by some critics as misogynistic and
misanthropic. 

Then, in an interview with the French magazine Lire in
August, the French author and all-around weirdo called
Islam the world's stupidest religion. Talk about
pushing buttons. The topic arose in a discussion of
his latest novel, Platform, which deals with sex
tourism and Middle Eastern terrorists. Four Islamic
organizations unsuccessfully sued him for defamation.
During the trial, Houellebecq clarified his statement,
calling the Koran a "mediocre" literary work compared
to the Bible. The religious flap has obscured the fact
that Houellebecq has authored some of the worst sex
scenes in recent literature. ("He was surprised to
discover that he could get a hard-on and even
ejaculate inside the researcher's vagina without
feeling the slightest pleasure.") 

Of all the writers with issues this year, Rohinton
Mistry was easily the most justified in speaking out.
This fall, the Booker-winning Canadian was touring his
latest novel, Family Matters, when he discovered a
not-so-fine balance in U.S. airports between vigilance
and racial profiling. He promptly cancelled the rest
of his trip. Mistry drew much-needed attention to U.S.
anti-terrorism measures, and was the only writer this
year who deserved to make the A section of the
newspaper. 



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