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

[jbor]

on 13/10/02 8:56 AM, MalignD at aol.com at MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> << 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  >>
> 
> You're saying Saul Bellow is "lowbrow"?!

Not really, and I thought twice before adding Graham Greene in as well.
Bellow's name was another which came up in Franzen's _New Yorker_ essay: the
"academic and hipster respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and
Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn't".

But my point was that in the SL 'Intro' Pynchon refers to _Augie March_ (and
_Our Man in Havana_) in particular rather than to Bellow (or Greene) in
general. I get the impression often in Pynchon's non-fiction that he is
playing up his preferences for more "popular" fictional genres (eg.
detective fiction, westerns, scifi, the Gothic novel) and titles, and
implicitly playing down the (rather obvious, to my mind) "intellectual" or
"difficult" influences on and precursors to his work.

I think the whole "highbrow"/"lowbrow" dichotomy is problematic, just like
the "Status"/"Contract" dichotomy which Franzen tries to set up in the 'New
Yorker' piece: ways of trying to conflate "taste" into "quality". On the
other hand, that there's a vast abyss between Barbara Cartland and
_Finnegans Wake_ seems pretty self-evident.

best

Franzen:

[...]

At the excellent public library in Somerville, Massachusetts, I identified a
canon of intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers.
The same names -- Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs,
Barth, Barthelme, Hannah, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin -- kept showing up
together in anthologies and in the respectful appraisals of contemporary
critics. 

[...]