Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[Sean Mannion]

"OUT OF THE BUNKER: Another novel that received a lot
of votes from our panel was Don DeLillo's "Underworld"
(1997). That novel, too, was not just a critical
success — it spent 10 weeks on the Times list in
hardcover. It was reviewed here by Martin Amis. "The
next wave of genius," he wrote, had finally arrived.
"The novelists are climbing out of the bunker. Don
DeLillo's exact contemporaries, Robert Stone and
Thomas Pynchon, seem poised for a fuller expansion.
DeLillo himself, however, suddenly fills the sky.
'Underworld' may or may not be a great novel, but
there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great
novelist." From the beginning of his career, Amis
wrote, "DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up,
his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metaled."
But after his first few novels "he was still a
turbulent tributary searching for a river." With
"Underworld," Amis suggested, he found it. But the
news in Amis's review wasn't all good. " 'Underworld'
is sprawling rather than monumental, and it is diffuse
in a way that a long novel needn't necessarily be.
There is an interval, approaching halfway, when the
performance goes awful quiet. But then it rebuilds,
regathering all its mass." The review went on: "
'Underworld' is his most demanding novel but it is
also his most transparent. It has an undertow of
personal pain, having to do with fateful
irreversibilities in a young life — a register that
DeLillo has never touched before. This isn't Meet the
Author. It is the earned but privileged intimacy that
comes when you see a writer whole."

I tend to agree wholeheartedly with Amis' review, except for the fact that I 
believe he 'found that river' as far back as the publication of 'The Names', 
and while Underworld may be 'sprawling rather than monumental', I find this 
easier to reconcile with Arnold Weinstein's point that "Like a latter-day 
Balzac or Zola, he seems to have some giant composite plan in mind, an 
all-encompassing scheme that, when completed, will bear witness to how we 
lived, worked, played, and sounded in the second half of the twentieth 
century" ('Nobody's Home'), except that I would more inclined to exchange 
the Balzac/Zola axis for Dos Passos, for I think of DeLillo's achievements 
in this respect as rather more correspondent to what Dos Passos was engaged 
in during the '20's/'30's.

With regards to Pynchon, I've always meant to go back and read 'The Names' 
and 'Crying of Lot 49'
simultaneously for parrallels and discontinuities - in former, it struck me 
that it is the referent and not the sign that is the bearer of some kind of 
epistemological certainty, while in the latter, it is the exact opposite 
(the Tystero have symbolic representation despite Oedipa's uncertainty over 
a true referent; Ta Onomata have an individuated and multiply-verifiable 
existence while having a 'a name' that signifies the only abstraction 'the 
names', not a singularization), and though both texts take on that 
'detective' matrix as an overarching frame, both demonstrate the inability 
to narrow down to specific identity; further, I always found it fascinating 
how, from the infamous 'G-strings of historical figuration' moment, the 
Tystero are embedded into historical narratives, while Ta Onomata clearly 
signal their theological purpose to place themselves a situation without 
associations,  'a place where it is possible for men to stop making history 
[...] inventing a way out'.


Relatedly, I'm about half-way through Amis' own 'London Fields'.





>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel
>Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 06:17:38 -0700 (PDT)
>
>May 21, 2006
>TBR
>Inside the List
>By DWIGHT GARNER
>
>BLUEST SKY: Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" (1987),
>the book selected by 124 fiction writers and critics
>in this issue as the best work of American fiction
>published since 1980, was reviewed in these pages by
>Margaret Atwood. "If there were any doubts about her
>stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own
>or any other generation," Atwood wrote, " 'Beloved'
>will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a
>hair-raiser." Atwood continued: " 'Beloved' is written
>in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich,
>graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous,
>colloquial and very much to the point."
>
>Morrison's novel found a popular audience as well. It
>spent more than six months on the Times best-seller
>list in hardcover, and nearly as long in paperback.
>"Beloved" did not win the National Book Award in 1987
>— that prize went, somewhat controversially, to Larry
>Heinemann's Vietnam War novel, "Paco's Story."
>(Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times shortly after
>Heinemann's novel was chosen, called Morrison's the
>better novel and asked: "What happened?") None of
>Morrison's first three novels — "The Bluest Eye"
>(1970), "Sula" (1973) or "Song of Solomon" (1977) —
>made the list when they were originally published. Her
>breakthrough novel, in terms of this page, was her
>fourth, "Tar Baby," which spent 17 weeks on the
>hardcover list in 1981.
>
>OUT OF THE BUNKER: Another novel that received a lot
>of votes from our panel was Don DeLillo's "Underworld"
>(1997). That novel, too, was not just a critical
>success — it spent 10 weeks on the Times list in
>hardcover. It was reviewed here by Martin Amis. "The
>next wave of genius," he wrote, had finally arrived.
>"The novelists are climbing out of the bunker. Don
>DeLillo's exact contemporaries, Robert Stone and
>Thomas Pynchon, seem poised for a fuller expansion.
>DeLillo himself, however, suddenly fills the sky.
>'Underworld' may or may not be a great novel, but
>there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great
>novelist." From the beginning of his career, Amis
>wrote, "DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up,
>his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metaled."
>But after his first few novels "he was still a
>turbulent tributary searching for a river." With
>"Underworld," Amis suggested, he found it. But the
>news in Amis's review wasn't all good. " 'Underworld'
>is sprawling rather than monumental, and it is diffuse
>in a way that a long novel needn't necessarily be.
>There is an interval, approaching halfway, when the
>performance goes awful quiet. But then it rebuilds,
>regathering all its mass." The review went on: "
>'Underworld' is his most demanding novel but it is
>also his most transparent. It has an undertow of
>personal pain, having to do with fateful
>irreversibilities in a young life — a register that
>DeLillo has never touched before. This isn't Meet the
>Author. It is the earned but privileged intimacy that
>comes when you see a writer whole."
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/21tbr.html
>
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