slaggin' Moore, Gaddis, Franzen and DeLillo pre-Nobel

[jbor]

Franzen also drops the, apparently obligatory, reference to Pynchon in that
'New Yorker' piece on Gaddis:

[...]

Indeed, one defense of Gaddis and his difficulty is that conventional
fiction, driven by substantial characters and based on a soul-to-soul
Contract between reader and writer, was simply inadequate to the social and
technological crises that twentieth-century writers saw developing all
around them. Both the moderns and the postmoderns resorted to a kind of
literature of emergency. The moderns employed new, self-conscious methods to
address the new reality and preserve the vanishing old one. The postmodern
enterprise was even more radical: to resist absorption or cooptation by an
all-absorbing, all-coopting System. Closure was the enemy, and the way to
avoid it was to refuse to participate in the System. For Pynchon this meant
flight and paranoia; for Burroughs it meant transgression. For Gaddis it
meant being very angry -- so angry that, at a certain point, he stopped
making sense. Half-way through _J R_, I bailed out. As one of his
ex-followers, I wonder: Did I betray him, or did he betray me?

[...]

best