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

[jbor]

Franzen's essay reminded me a lot of Pynchon's _Slow Learner_ 'Intro'. Just
like Franzen does, Pynchon seems to be boasting about his own "lowbrow"
reading tastes, making a point to note his enjoyment of novels by Buchan,
Greene, Wilson, Le Carré, Bellow (and, elsewhere, Hall's _Warlock_). And
Pynchon adopts a similarly self-deprecating tone about his own early work
and aspirations/pretensions/lifestyle etc. (I guess what he doesn't do is
slag off at those works and authors he *doesn't* like, however.)

As well as numbering _Mason & Dixon_ amongst the "difficult" books which he
failed to finish, Franzen makes a couple more comments about Pynchon's work:

[...]

Gaddis, it was generally agreed, was the really smart, really angry, really
forbidding Systems writer. _The Recognitions_ was an ur-text of postwar
fiction, both the grand-daddy of difficulty and the first great cultural
critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing
_Catch-22_ and _V._, managed to anticipate the spirit of both. Gaddis was
the original intense, thrift-store-clad, monster-data-set young man whose
ambition, if he let it show in public, would have singed his fellow subway
riders' eyebrows.

My problem was that, with a few exceptions, notably Don DeLillo, I didn't
particularly like the writers in my modern canon. I checked out their books
(including _The Recognitions_), read a few pages, and returned them. I liked
the idea of socially engaged fiction, I was at work on my own Systems novel
of conspiracy and apocalypse, and 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 reading. If Coover's _The Public Burning_ and Pynchon's _The Crying
of Lot 49_ moved me, it was mainly because I loved Coover's character
Richard Nixon and Pynchon's Oedipa Maas. But postmodern fiction wasn't
supposed to be about sympathetic characters. Characters, properly speaking,
weren't even supposed to exist. Characters were feeble, suspect constructs,
like the author himself, like the human soul. Nevertheless, to my shame, I
seemed to need them.

[...]

best