Pynchon mention

[Richard Romeo]

>
>
>[...] we are witnessing the later stages of a long warfare between what I 
> >think of as ascetic realism-a belief in the artistic and ethical primacy 
>of >the understated treatment of the here and now-and something we might 
>call, >for want of an official term, "maximalism," a tendency toward 
>expansive, >centrifugal narrative that aspires to embrace the complexity of 
> >contemporary life. If we go back a quarter-century, to the mid-1970s, we 
> >can see the polarity alive and well, represented, on the one hand, by 
> >Raymond Carver's influential short-story collection Will You Please Be 
> >Quiet, Please? (1976) and, on the other, by Thomas Pynchon's 
>limit-busting >novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
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It's odd that Birkets notes the primacy of Pynchon's maximalist, yet I'd 
argue that the maximalists have lost, or are losing the war in that like 
clinton co-opting republican campaign strategies, those influenced or said 
to be influenced by Pynchon, are moving or have moved towards the minimalist 
stage:  dellilo post-underworld, ricky moody generally who reviews writers 
like coover and pynchon, and yet exhibits some weird neo-hybrid realist 
fiction reducing his work into some sort of miasmic funk that smells bad or 
worse bland, david foster wallace post-IJ, barth for the last 20 yrs, 
richard powers and jonathan franzen, both in The Corrections and Powers 
forthcoming Corrections-like family saga to be pub. in jan 2003 or any of 
his last two or three novels or Franzens for that matter tho large and 
complex in their own ways are strictally in that neo-realist, minimalist 
mode...i'm sure you can come up with more examples of your own.

No one truly writes full blown postmodern novels anymore on a big scale of 
more than 400 pgs, books that don't include gadgets, weird fonts, one word 
pgs like House of Leaves, e.g. or are quite limited in vision like donald 
antrum...besides pynchon, coover? anyone

just my 2 cents

rich



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