LeClair: Prodigious Fiction

[jbor at bigpond.com]

'The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David 
Foster Wallace'
by Tom LeClair, _Critique_ 38.1,  Autumn 1996, pp. 12-	

Interesting essay by an influential and highly-regarded critic, 
assesses Pynchon's influence on contemporary American fiction, 
particularly in terms of the way the novels are immersed in various of 
the sciences. Focuses in particular on Powers's _The Gold Bug 
Variations_, Vollmann's _You Bright and Risen Angels_ and Wallace's 
_Infinite Jest_.

Begins:
Since the publication of _V._ in 1963, when Thomas Pynchon was 
twenty-six, he has been the reigning, if now aging, prodigy of 
contemporary American fiction, the gifted author of two prodigious 
novels, the 492-page _V._ and the encyclopedic _Gravity's Rainbow_. 
Reviewing the more modest _Vineland_ in 1990, Richard Powers addressed 
Pynchon as a composer of bed-time stories: "So tell us another one, 
Pop, before it gets too dark." [_Yale Review_ 79, p. 698] Powers, 
William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace all admit within their 
novels their filial debt to "Pop" Pynchon. A major character in 
Powers's _The Goldbug Variations_ has Pynchon as his "favorite living 
novelist" (468), several references to GR appear in Vollmann's _You 
Bright and Risen Angels_, and a major character in Wallace's _Infinite 
Jest_ is constructed from the obsessions of Pynchon's biggest book. Of 
the three younger writers, Wallace is the most ambivalent toward 
Pynchon: Wallace praises GR as generous in its gift-giving but also 
calls Pynchon, along with Nabokov, "a patriarch for my patricide" 
(146). Though still alive, Pynchon seems to have retired from 
novelistic mastery to become the grandfatherly proprietor of an 
amusement park called _Vineland_. [...]

Pdf available.

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