Well I just reread Vineland and the news is still bad...
Ray Easton
kraimie at kraimie.net
Tue Jun 12 14:25:54 CDT 2007
On Tuesday, Jun 12, 2007, at 11:53 US/Central, Chris Broderick wrote:
> Fonz (AKA H. Musikar?) sez:
>
> AtD is a piece of shit.
>
> So I say:
>
> OK. Maybe so. But why? And if so, why bother reading it?
Unlike The Fonz, I quite enjoyed VL and I think that M&D is very good.
Both may well be "mediocre compared to GR" -- but something can be
quite good and still be "mediocre compared to GR". I joined the list
last Fall for the express purpose of participating in the group read of
AtD. I have been participating, but silently -- because AtD seems to
me so bad that I feel have nothing to contribute.
Why is it bad? From my perspective, trying to show that AtD is bad
would be like trying to prove that there is no Martian in the room with
me now -- there's simply nothing at all about it that is any good. The
only thing to recommend it is the occasional brilliance of the prose,
though appearing in the contexts it does, even that cannot redeem this
novel.
I've no interest in arguing this view, for a couple of reasons. In the
first place, it strikes me that arguing this view on the p-list would
be rather like arguing to a devout Catholic that the doctrine of the
Trinity is horseshit. Except in the rarest of circumstances, no good
is going to come from such a discussion. More importantly, I'm not at
this point quite prepared to write AtD off. When confronted with a
"large" work of art by a major artist that appears to be awful, I think
that one should be initially suspicious that the problem is with
oneself, rather than with the work. I could not finish the _The
Recognitions_ on my first attempt, and I would now put it on a very
short list of important post-WWII American fiction. I am still hoping
that I am wrong about AtD, and am hoping that perhaps the exchanges on
the list during the group read will enable me to "get it".
Why bother reading it? Well, gee, how was I supposed to know how bad
it was before I read it? Trust the reviewers?
Ray
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