AtD / TRP / feminist type stuff

[terrance terrance]

Some Shapes in Recent American Fiction
Earl Rovit
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 539-561

>From: "terrance terrance" <terrorence at hotmail.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: RE: AtD / TRP / feminist type stuff
>Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:39:03 -0500
>
>In one of his famous lectures, Nabokov gives some pretty sound advice to 
>good readers. He says something like ... a good reader is an active and 
>creative reader and a re-reader. That reading and re-reading supreme works 
>of prose fiction so as to understand them as the author created them is the 
>only way to go about the business of reading any book worth rereading. It's 
>only after the very difficult and thrilling work of reading and rereading a 
>book like Moby-Dick or Pale Fire that one can begin to use the tools of the 
>trade to connect the book with other great works and other interesting 
>things. I thinl Nabokov implies, or perhaps he states explicitly, that to 
>do otherwise is to give an unfair advantage to the reader at the expense of 
>the author. How Prophetic! Today we don't read much at all. Not fair to 
>authors, but we're too busy. Today we simply don't have time to understand 
>a book as big and as complex as most of the books TRP, other guys and gals 
>like him,  write. Today we need a book that's made for us. I'm a Feminist. 
>How are the chicks in his new book? I'm a Marxist. How are the workers? I'm 
>a Sci-Fi guy. How are the worlds juxtaposed? Back in 1973-74 things were 
>different. The novel, although dozens of great ones were being published, 
>was dying. So were lots of people. People were getting high and rock and 
>roll was never going to die. But the novel was dying and it had little to 
>do with war or drugs or sex. It seems to me that TRP and his kind did 
>everything in their power to kill the novel.   They failed. In fact, GR 
>wond TRP The National Book Award. He didn't win because he described gross 
>sex acts. He did something we no longer have time for. So get out your 
>tools and hammer away. Who has time to read a book like AtD anyway?
>
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