Pynchon in Peck Review

[Steve Maas]

A review of Rick Moody's _The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions_ by a 
Dale Peck, a writer of novels, turns into a generalized trashing of pomo lit 
(personally, I dislike pigeon-holing and would not put P. in a box). The 
review includes two mentions of our man (see below). Both quotes require 
lengthy paragraphs to provide context. The first is sort of a back-handed 
compliment, basically he says P. isn't as bad as some of the Whole Sick 
Crew. The second is a strange, unexplicated disparagement.(I haven't seen 
any prior mention of this review; if I'm repeating old info please forgive.)

     Steve Maas

>From Dale Peck:
"And yet there is that urgency I mentioned before, the hysterical desire to 
be heard. For all its shrillness, Moody's volume strikes me as something 
more than the antics of a child needing attention. I say this as a fellow 
novelist: though he has never put together a single sentence that I would 
call indispensable, there is a true empathetic undercurrent in Moody's work. 
I find the same current in the work of David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey 
Eugenides and Colson Whitehead, but not in the work of Richard Powers and 
Dave Eggers and Donald Antrim and Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem. I 
find it in Thomas Pynchon but not in Don DeLillo, here and there in John 
Barth and Donald Barthelme but almost entirely absent in John Fowles and 
John Hawkes and William Gaddis, in Lolita but not in Pale Fire, in the early 
Joyce, the first one and a half books, but not in the last two and a half 
books."

[...]

"Again, this is not meant to malign the aforementioned writers. I don't want 
to suggest that they are uniformly talentless or misguided; or that there is 
a conspiracy among them, or among them and the editors of The New Yorker or 
Harper's or The Paris Review; or that they invest any of their energy in 
excluding others from the upper echelons of the literary world. All I'm 
suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the 
heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic 
flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible 
ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then 
burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes 
and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the 
word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally 
broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid--just 
plain stupid--tomes of DeLillo."

The review is online at:
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020701&s=peck070102


_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com