The flattened American landscape of minor writers

[Carvill, John]

Updike Schmupdike!

Why do these slavering articles on Updike (and Roth) in the English
press always discount, in fact often fail entirely to mention, Pynchon?

Particularly galling since TRP pitched in to defend Ian McEwan a while
back, despite the mediocre quality of McEwan's wildly overrated work.

Bellow was an immense talent, though a pretty nasty person and prone to
cod philosophising and right-wing curmudgeonliness. Roth is great, but
of course he has published some clunkers lately. The Rabbit books
(execpt the final novella) were wonderfully enjoyable, but I could never
finish any of Updike's other books.

Pynchon shoulda been a contender for da Nobel, on the strength of GR
alone. When he also produced M&D and they *still* ignored him, their
prize proved itself to be a joke.


<< "And now this masterly blasphemer, whose literary schemes and pretty
conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean, is gone, and American
letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer, is a
leveled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth. We are coming to
the end of the golden age of the American novel in the twentieth
century's second half."

Ian McEwan, "On John Updike"
_New York Review of Books_ Volume 56, Number 4, March 12 2009 >>