Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

"[...] What's heartening, while at the same time
scary, is that a remarkable generation of American
writers keeps on trucking into senior citizenship.
Saul Bellow is eighty-seven; Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut,
and Grace Paley are eighty; William H. Gass, William
Styron, Gore Vidal, John Barth, William Kennedy,
Robert Coover, Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Philip
Roth, and John Updike are all in their seventies; and
Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Robert Stone,
Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and John Edgar
Wideman are in their sixties. This in spite of what
Mailer suggests are odds stacked against Quixote to
begin with:

'Of course, it's virtually as if writers are there to
be ruined. Look at the list: booze, pot, too much sex,
too little, too much failure in one's private life,
too much attention, too much recognition, too little
recognition, frustration. Nearly everything in the
scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent.
But the worst probably is cowardice—as one gets older,
one becomes aware of one's cowardice. The desire to be
bold, which once was a joy, gets heavy with caution
and duty. And finally there's apathy. About the time
it doesn't seem too important to be a major writer,
you know you've slipped far enough to be doing your
work on the comeback trail. [...]' "


The New York Review of Books
March 13, 2003
Review

Don Quixote at Eighty
By John Leonard
The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
by Norman Mailer
Random House, 330 pp., $24.95
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16115>


-Doug



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