Pynchon/DeLillo/Coover mention WAS Re: Pynchon in Peck Review

[Doug Millison]

Alessandro Barico's City (Knopf, $ 25), translated from the Italian by Ann
Goldstein, is the story of two isolated, oddball souls: Gould (no first
name given), a 13-year-old prodigy, and Shatzy Shell, his thirtysomething
governess. Each lives in a fantasy world that functions as a lively
alternative to human connection. Gould spins out a mock-heroic tale about
an underdog boxer for his two imaginary friends, a giant and a mute; while
Shatzy, since the age of 6, has been dictating a Western into her tape
recorder. Put so baldly, the novel does not seem promising, but the stories
within the story are filled with wild invention and lyrical prose.

What Gould's boxing matches and Shatzy's Western have in common are moments
of existential confrontation: the prizefighters in the ring in Gould's case
and a gunfight at noon in Shatzy's. Add the lectures about physics and
metaphysics that Gould hears at college (he is being prepared for the Nobel
Prize that his father believes his genius son will someday win), and the
result is a series of circles that surround the destiny of both Barico's
characters and the characters they invent. The setting of City is the
United States, a place, a city, if you will, that Barico renders with
comic-book wackiness. Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave
with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas
Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious
and profoundly sad as Gould and Shatzy make their respective ways through
fantasies that cannot, alas, keep out quotidian life.

from:
BOOK WORLD; Pg. T15; INTERNATIONAL FICTIONREVIEWED BY SANFORD PINSKER
The Washington Post
June 30, 2002






At 8:57 PM +0000 7/24/02, Richard Romeo wrote:
>
>all these writers are just too realistic for me.
>give me uncle sam buggering a president or a were-beaver anytime.
>