Pynchon/Roth/Bellow/Updike on the 1960s

[Mark Kohut]

Re McEwan and these other writers. I think the divide is as it has been stated
by many, lately Zadie Smith, led by James Wood the new high priest of Lit Crit.

Novelists must be 'realists' in some way,(I know this oversimplifies Wood who gives counterexamples) creating characters so round that the question of whether their roundness can contain the deepest historical judgment of our loss of
human roundness cannot be fully dealt with. How do you create the roundest fictional characters if your vision sees
how 'inhuman' we all are? (Except, of course, in M & D, praised by many Pychon dissers for his full-bodied characters.)

I think the question regarding Updike is: was he more than a journalist of his age with a beautiful style?

McEwan might think Pynchon does not, in general, get the world down, get people down, as he tries to, as
he thinks Roth does and as Updikie could. Many, led by Wood, think this about Pynchon.


Like many on this list,--"I'm nobody, who are you?"--- like Rushdie, like lots of other writers (and a few 'critics"), I think that whatever we call Pynchon's work--poetry, Menippean satire, 'encyclopedic' fiction---it is among the best of our age.