Inherent Vice review New York Magazine

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 3, 2009, at 6:02 AM, Carvill, John wrote:

> Agree that the reviewer is at least honest enough to admit he just  
> doesn't like Pynchon.
>
> And some of what he said was quiote entertaining, even if I don't  
> agree with him. That bit about enjoying the first 15 pages or so,  
> but then 'the author throws a big !Pynchon! switch' made me smile.  
> It's a negative review, in a sense, but it doesn't make you angry or  
> depressed, the way Laura Miller's Salon piece did. . .

. . . or come up with a STUPID concept like "Hysterical Realism"  
solely to deploy as a critical smack-down for literature a critic  
can't [or chooses to refuse to] understand:

Friday Column: James Wood Reviews Against the Day
By Scott Esposito on March 2, 2007

	. . . In the penultimate paragraph, Wood undertakes to give us a list
	of books that we would be better off spending our time with instead
	of Against the Day:

		What if you wanted a novel that had little plot but much
		internal story, that was morally and aesthetically complex,
		stylistically difficult and demanding, determined to put
		language to some kind of challenge, formally lovely and
		alluring, humanly serious but also humanly comic (I mean a
		book that comically investigated deep human motive)? A
		novel that was narrated in the internal voices of several
		different characters, but characters who really have their own
		voices, not just vaudeville ventriloquism? Well, then, you
		might read the great novels that are set in the same era as
		Against the Day: these include The Man Without Qualities,
		Remembrance of Things Past, The Radetzky March, The
		Secret Agent, Confessions of Zeno (which ends with a
		prophesy of something very like atomic destruction), The
		Magic Mountain (which ends with the Great War), The Good
		Soldier Svejk.

	A very good list of books, but with one quite obvious weakness--
	they were all written during or shortly after the period of time that
	they cover. I can't believe that a critic of Wood's intellect failed to
	realize that the kind of take you're going to get on 1893-1927 is
	going to be vastly different depending on if it's an author like
	Proust, writing from an early 20th-century, modernist perspective,
	or someone like Pynchon, writing from a millennial, postmodernist
	perspective. Can you really just switcheroo Pynchon and Mann
	like that? Perhaps Wood really doesn't see what places Pynchon's
	books into entirely different dimensions from these authors'.
	Perhaps he really thinks that the vast majority of postmodern
	literature really doesn't say much that wasn't said better 50 years
	before. That would explain a lot.

	Unfortuantely, though, it doesn't help the cause of literature much.
	Blinding yourself to all the things that an author like Pynchon can
	do--things that Proust, Musil, Conrad, Svevo, for all their talents,
	just don't do because they're creatures of an entirely different
	world than Pynchon--is to place yourself in some kind of pre-
	postmodern time capsule. Well, I'm sure that when he goes to
	read, Wood must put a nice record on the RCA (perhaps Bernstein
	conducting Mahler), brush his copy of Partisan Review off the
	chair, and check to see that the kids next door aren't messing with
	his tail-finned Cadillac, but I'm forced to live, and read, in the 21st
	century--you know, the one with iPods and the Internet, where
	authors like Pynchon and DeLillo and Sorrentino are respected
	masters, where David Foster Wallace is a major force, where
	White Teeth can't be dismissed simply because it has strange
	characters and unbelievable plot developments. I don't quite have
	the personal fortitude to will a good chunk of postwar literature into
	non-existence.

	So, good for Wood. Damn if he isn't towing a very tough line, one
	that's let him develop an impressive reputation and let him carve
	out his own little niche of literary criticism. But what was fresh and
	provocative 10 years ago is now getting a little stale and tiresome.
	He made his point, and he punctured a form of literature that had
	probably gotten a little too full of itself. But now it's time to  
move on.
	Literature doesn't need preachers and dogma. Literature needs
	more critics like the James Wood we see when he's engaging a
	novel on its own terms.


http://www.conversationalreading.com/2007/03/friday_column_j.html

You want hysterical realism? Try Raymond Chandler.