Parochial Plea

[tbeshear]

>
> The world is a distant rumour in much recent American fiction.

That's one of the reasons I was disappointed the voters in the Millions poll 
showed no love for "Europe Central" by William T. Vollmann, a novel by an 
American that's immersed in Germany and Russia and in which America is most 
notable for its absence and irrelevance.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 3:10 AM
Subject: RE: Parochial Plea


>
> alice:
>
>> Well, an American certainly, but a writer who, with his very first
>> novel goes after the world. His are Big books that take on lots of
>> lands. South America, while not as important as North America is
>> certainly a part of the landscape. Places like Malta and Islands
>> between Brasil and Africa ...Egypt ...Japan . . .TV-Land . . .P's
>> fictions are, as all American Literature is, Modern, Recent, and
>> International if not Multinational or Global.
>
> Spot on, with the possible exception of "as all American Literature
> is": It seems to me that an increasing number of American novelists
> have directed their attention inwards, at least since 1990 or so.
> I think the opening line of Underworld is symptomatic:
>
> "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye
> that's halfway hopeful."
>
> It's pretty clear whom DeLillo is talking to here, and in the rest
> of the novel it's pretty clear what he's writing about: America.
> The few excursions outside of America in the novel (to Russia), feel
> forced and embarrassingly stereotypical.
>
> David Foster Wallace's vast and encyclopedic Infinite Jest mostly
> takes place in a small (fictive) part of Boston, and when Jonathan
> Franzen in The Corrections (just lauded as the best fiction of the
> millenium so far) briefly ventures outside American borders, to
> Lithuania, the results are again crude and embarrassing.
>
> Of course there are plenty of exceptions (including Pynchon, of
> course), and of course there is nothing particularly wrong with
> this tendency: If Wallace and Franzen and DeLillo write better
> about America than about the world, I'd rather they stick with
> America.
>
> But - at least seen from Europe - the American novel of the last
> couple of decades, and perhaps especially after 9/11, has grown
> increasingly provincial. The muted and claustrophobic "Falling Man"
> as a response to the global tremors of 9/11? How strange is that!
>
> The world is a distant rumour in much recent American fiction.
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