Pynchon's fat novel repudiated?

[pynchonoid]

And afterward, the dark

Eventide bravely complicates the world Kent Haruf
explored in Plainsong

By JOHN MARK EBERHART

The Kansas City Star

In a mere 18 months in 1997 and 1998, readers were
confronted with three mammoth novels that would
strongly influence American fiction. Yet their impact,
it could be argued, has been one of repudiation.

In April 1997 down rained Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
Dixon, a 784-page deluge that drew some praise but
also vexed many readers with what they saw as tedium
and pretension.

Don DeLillo's Underworld was expected to snare at
least one major literary prize for works of fiction
published that year, but the 832-page novel, which saw
print in autumn, would lose the Pulitzer to Philip
Roth's American Pastoral, the National Book Award to
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and the National Book
Critics Circle honor to Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue
Flower.

The fall of 1998 brought all 727 pages of Tom Wolfe's
A Man in Full, which generally received reviews less
kind than those that had greeted The Bonfire of the
Vanities.

Six years later, the American novel remains fatter
than its British counterpart, but even in this country
the trend has been toward shorter books — Alice
Sebold's The Lovely Bones, Michael Cunningham's The
Hours.

It's unfair to say that DeLillo, Pynchon or Wolfe
“failed” with their opuses; mention any of those three
books now in any sizable literary circle, and
defenders will rise. DeLillo's Underworld, in
particular, has its zealous protectors. Indeed, I
regard it as perhaps his career pinnacle, prizes be
damned.

But the three novels' mixed reception was significant.
Their “failure” was a bellwether of changes in
readers' attention spans. The relentless rise of the
Internet, the casual nature of e-mail, the picked-up
pace of our electronic world, has made busy lives even
busier.

Yet I do not subscribe to the maxim that shorter
literature is always better. It depends on the writer.
Certainly Ernest Hemingway remains a model of the
concise approach, and one so powerful that even a
roomy writer like John Updike emulated his short
stories. Updike's novels, though, work best when he is
at his most spacious.

Which brings us (finally) to Kent Haruf's new novel,
Eventide. It is 300 pages long. It is clipped but
somehow easygoing. It is plain enough for a child to
absorb, although the subject matter is not appropriate
for wee ones. [...] 

<http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/8553664.htm>


	
		
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