Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021202&s=wolcott120202

[...] Once upon a time Franzen pledged allegiance to
the modernist canon, but now he committed infidelity
in his heart. "I craved academic and hipster respect
of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul
Bellow and Ann Beattie didn't. But Bellow and Beattie,
not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Bronte and
Dostoyevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I
actually, unhiply enjoyed." Never mind that Ann
Beattie and her sister-brother minimalists were very
much the rage in the 1980s, or that the author of Mr.
Sammler's Planet never sought "hipster respect." Who
in his right mind reads the classics calculating
whether Dostoyevsky and Bronte (which one: Emily?
Charlotte? Anne?) are hip or unhip to enjoy? Only a
budding writer-politician, a junior pollster. Now that
Franzen has reconciled himself with being an
unabashed, accessible storyteller--the John Gardner
prose-philosopher of the post-postmodern era-- he is
regretfully consigning Gaddis and the "difficult
novel" to the scrap heap. It is a symbolic act of
parricide on Franzen's part. "Regarding Gaddis's two
posthumously published books, I feel the way I did
when my father was in a nursing home. Unless you're a
very good friend, it's better not to see him
suffering." Considering that Franzen's father died of
Alzheimer's, his deterioration the subject of the
first piece in How to Be Alone, the comparison could
hardly be more pointed. [...] 


from:
Advertisement for Himself
by James Wolcott 

review of
How to Be Alone
by Jonathan Franzen
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $24)



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

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com