Parochial Plea

[rich]

On 9/29/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
__________________
The Names does a better job with this (Greece) though again the
obsession for these ex-pats is "are they killing Americans" sort

>
> 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.
_____________
Franzen is embarrassing--if anyone deserved a literary kick in the ass
for dissing William Gaddis, its that mofo. and his books suck  ;)
don't get me started on Lethem--does he have to write the intro to
every freaking lost classic?
One good effort is Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise--I thought that
book surveyed the corruption and its effects on an imaginary Latin
American country very well

>
> 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.
_______________
to its detriment, tho alot of what's belched out in Europe, is short
and very much inward-looking--its the trend, the thing that sells,
feelings and martial strife, and cancer diagnosis, and bad sex or lack
of, drug exploits, nihilism, too much optimism. I miss the likes of
W.G. Sebald
		 	   		
Rich