Literary thoughts

[Dave Monroe]

Foss Forward
Literary thoughts
By Sara Foss
Thursday, July 9, 2009


Before I write anything else, I want to alert readers to the New York
Library Association’s plan to create a New York State Writers’ Hall of
Fame. The hall will induct its first five writers next April, at the
NYLA’s first Empire State Book Festival (for more on that, click
here), and the organization is encouraging people to nominate writers
who are native New Yorkers or have lived significant parts of their
lives in New York to the hall of fame. There are plenty of great
writers to choose from — Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton
and Albany resident William Kennedy come immediately to mind — and the
winners will be announced on Oct. 15 in Niagara Falls. Click here to
send the NYLA your nominees.

Speaking of New York writers, I’ve decided to take another crack at
“V,” the 1961 novel by Thomas Pynchon, who was born in Glen Cove, Long
Island. I tried to read this book in college, but abandoned it early
on. I wasn’t alone — according to my post-modern literature professor,
three-quarters of the class got depressed and quit reading before the
midway point. But I didn’t remember getting depressed. In fact, I
remembered liking “V.” So why had I stopped reading it? Surely there
was a reason.

When I started re-reading “V,” I was still mystified. “This book is
great!” I thought. And it was great. The first two chapters were
exhilarating — dense, darkly comic, imaginative prose, written in a
freewheeling, intellectually stimulating style that paved the way for
later post-modernists such as (Ithaca native) David Foster Wallace,
(Peekskill native) T. Coraghessan Boyle and (Brooklyn native) Jonathan
Lethem. I couldn’t wait to read more about protagonist Benny Profane,
his gang of friends — known as the Whole Sick Crew — and their various
misadventures.

But then I hit chapter 3, and it was a slog. Titled “In which Stencil,
a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations,” chapter 3 is
comprised of eight sections, told from different points of view, which
tell a story of “murder and intrigue” in Egypt during the late 18th
century, according to Wikipedia. I cite Wikipedia because I found
chapter 3 so thoroughly confusing that I decided to go online and see
if someone could tell me what in god’s name was going on.

Anyway, I read chapter 3 a couple of times in a desperate attempt to
understand it; soon after, I hit a dog-eared page marking the spot
where I’d stopped reading “V” in college, and suddenly understood why
I’d walked away from the book. Pynchon’s exhilarating use of language
had quickly become exhausting. But this time, I forged ahead, and “V”
soon regained its footing, returning to the absurdist, poetically
profane territory of the first two chapters. I won’t lie — some of the
writing still makes me want to bang my head against a wall. But for
every maddening sentence like this:

“Such was the (as it were) Jacobean etiology of Esther’s eventual trip
to Cuba; which see.”

There’s a poignant, descriptive, clearly written passage like this:

“So in January 1956 Benny Profane showed up again in New York. He came
into town at the tag-end of a spell of false spring, found a mattress
at a downtown flophouse called Our Home, and a newspaper at an uptown
kiosk; roamed the streets late that night studying the classified by
streetlight. As usual nobody wanted him in particular.”

In other literary news, I finally finished Kiran Desai’s “The
Inheritance of Loss,” a Man Booker prize winner in 2006. A colorful
and vivid tale set in both India and the United States, “The
Inheritance of Loss” tells the story of a teenage girl named Sai, who
lives with her reclusive, bitter grandfather in his isolated estate in
the Himalayan foothills, and of a young man Biju, an illegal immigrant
eking out an existence in New York City. I admired “The Inheritance of
Loss,” but never felt fully engaged by it. The writing was good, but I
never really cared all that much about the characters — for some
reason, they never came alive for me.

But people love this book, and it now takes its place on my list of
Highly Acclaimed Recent Novels That I Liked, But Didn’t Love. This
list includes:

1. “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer
2. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon
3. “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith
4. “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
5. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen

These are good books and all, but I just don’t love them. But I’m
clearly in the minority, because everybody else does

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