HJ "The Art of Fiction"

[Michael Bailey]

Campbel Morgan wrote:
> Again, the author, while he can't quite keep his political ideas off the
> table all the time, has set out to write a perfect work of art and to
> demonstrate his skills. His quip on HJ at the start of the adventure that
> quickly goes North, or is it South?, over the rainbow anyway, is telling; he
> is not HJ and has no reason to be, but is, while as far from the realist
> fiction of HJ's day, an artist composing fiction as HJ outlined and defined
> it: he practices the ART of fiction. He plays with Twain, TSI, he plays with
> Hemingway, Eliot, Fitzgerald, then, as HJ does, the encounter of the
> Americans and the old world and the sins of the world, then two California
> briefs that play around political party talk and happenings in cultural
> bursts, then a masterwork and another, now to the California again for an
> easy rider. The voice, the style, so brilliant at times, as in AGTD, now
> languishes and bleeds a screed from the end of the bar.

a) again, welcome to the list, good to see a fresh email header !
b) what is it with Henry James, anyway?  Philip Roth quotes him a lot too!
c) where is it written in stone that a novel shouldn't express political views?
d) where in Pynchon can we be sure that we do really see the author
expressing his own heartfelt beliefs, rather than putting views in the
mouths of characters for them to be refracted and often refuted by
other characters and plot developments?



-- 
"No, not a political novel.  More a pathological novel.  A psychotic novel."
- Margaret Drabble (_A Natural Curiosity_)