Can or should creative writing be taught?

[Robin Landseadel]

Just re-read Menand's review of "Against the Day." My conclusion is  
that he just doesn't "get it." I suspect that were he to give the book  
an additional read-through, dots would start to connect. For the moment:

	. . . There is too much going on among too many characters in
	too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as
	though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction
	—boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic
	books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn.
	There are echoes of L. Frank Baum, Louis L’Amour, Raymond
	Chandler, John le Carré, “Star Trek,” and even Philip Pullman’s
	children’s trilogy “His Dark Materials.” This was all surely part of
	the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of
	modern culture. As always, it’s an amazing feat. Pynchon must
	have set out to make his readers dizzy and, in the process,
	become a little dizzy himself.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/27/061127crbo_books

. . . it appears that Menand is 'fessing up to not "getting it" in his  
concluding paragraph. Certainly the rise and development of all these  
different genre fictions is central to "Against the Day." Note that  
Pynchon's next book was a genre exercise. What Louis Menand is saying  
here in his dismissal of Against the Day strikes me as shallow. Mr.  
Menand's review of Inherent Vice strikes me as similarly shallow:

	. . . The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the
	minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes
	them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal
	policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the
	nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-
	key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—
	but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving
	a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not
	appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure
	allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be
	missing everything.)

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/08/03/090803crbo_books_menand

Could be.

On Dec 5, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> P.S. Confession re Menand: his negative review of Against the Day  
> (in the New Yorker) struck deeper in me than Wood's ever did. I have  
> not reread it 'cause i don't care if, as judgment, he is right. The  
> book is STILL worth explicating for whatever it is.