"The recluse club" w/ Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

They've got it wrong about Pynchon *never* giving an
interview and being a "recluse" of course....

<http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1136038,00.html>

The recluse club     
                     
Liz Hoggard
Sunday    February  1, 2004
The Observer                 
                 
The literary world is agog. Joanna Trollope has
refused to do any press for her new novel, Brother and
Sister. She wants the writing to speak for itself. Can
this really be the same woman who posed upside down in
a feather boa in the Daily Mail?

Trollope has always been tireless on the publicity
front - reinventing herself as a vicar's wife, a
'wicked' stepmother and, most recently, a
bachelorette, to mark each new stage of her career. I
was once dispatched to interview her by a glossy
fashion magazine (the original interviewer having
suddenly remembered a pressing catwalk show). When I
confessed I'd only started reading her novel on the
Tube, Trollope was a sport. 'You've reached page 14?
My favourite page.' But those days are long past. The
queen of the Aga saga has learned her lesson. If you
want to be taken seriously by the critics, secrecy is
everything. Out goes Richard and Judy and Hay-on-Wye.
In comes enforced literary purdah.

Ever since she's trained her focus away from the
rectory to the modern stepfamily (and even the local
council estate), Trollope has written fantastic social
novels. If you want lust or jealousy or sibling
rivalry, look no further. She has an incisive - and
deadly - eye for the minutiae of modern family life.
But snobs persist in seeing her as a writer of
middlebrow potboilers.

Not any more. By taking a vow of silence, Trollope has
elevated herself to the pantheon of authors who never
do interviews. Welcome to the recluse club. There's
Thomas Pynchon who has never done a single interview
or reading. In the 1960s, JD Salinger withdrew into
his house at the top of a fortified hill in New
Hampshire (only briefly emerging to 'sue' his
biographer, Ian Hamilton, in 1987). And Harper Lee is
78 this May, but don't expect an invite to the
birthday party.

Heroic recluses hate pressing the flesh. JM Coetzee
didn't bother to turn up to collect either of his
Booker Prizes. Thomas Harris courteously refuses all
journalists with the words: 'I really can't start
giving interviews now.' Don DeLillo once handed over a
postcard with the words 'I don't want to talk about
it' to a hapless academic who tracked him down in
Greece.

Knowledge of an author's life inevitably has a
banalising effect on their fiction, inviting readers
to gloss the work as autobiography. So there's
something refreshing about authors who don't want
their 15 minutes of fame (eat your hearts out, Madonna
and Sophie Dahl); who prefer to let their work float
free in the reader's imagination.

But spare a thought for the poor bloody journalist.
That whole 'man of mystery' routine doesn't go down
too well at features meetings. It's no good wailing
that Anne Tyler or Harold Pinter are famously
publicity-shy. It only makes the editor more eager. At
this very moment, commissioning editors are tearfully
phoning Bloomsbury: 'But Joanna has always been so
helpful in the past!' Daughters of famous novelists
(you didn't think they were appointed for their
A-levels, did you?) will be dispatched for special
pleading. And Joanna herself will be subjected to a
barrage of dinner dates, flowers, novelty cakes and
mystery spa breaks.

I want to admire the literary recluse, I really do.
There's something thrilling about all that severity.
But my heart goes out to writers like Fay Weldon (who
brokered a deal with jeweller Bulgari) or Kathy Lette,
who gamely sat in a basque in a shop window to promote
one novel. Those girls understand what goes on at the
coal face.

Of course, the fish every journo wants to land is the
'interview for no reason'. Which doesn't contain a
single reference to a new book or a film or a website.
Which implies we are merely eavesdropping on a
conversation between good friends. In 2002, the Mirror
had a total scoop. Under the unlikely headline 'I went
on the pull like any normal bloke but infidelity
sapped me', the red top's intrepid Christine Smith
recounted how she spent the day in the elegant London
home of... one Martin Amis.

Every journalist I spoke to was livid. 'How the hell
did she get that? What was his publisher thinking of?'
Far from being intimidated by such a literary
colossus, Smith was brutally frank about her
interviewee: 'Shaking like a leaf, this tiny, slimly
built man dressed casually in a pastel tracksuit
refuses to smile for photos, while barely managing to
speak... I quickly realise his weird behaviour hides
the fact that Martin is actually very nervous.'

Equally boldly, she took him through his love life,
his former drug use and his relationship with his
father, before confessing that she had never read any
of his novels. Ever. And guess what? Marty loved it.
'Mmm, it's certainly a postmodern way of conducting an
interview.' So, Joanna, please won't you reconsider?



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/