Chronic City??? final thoughts

[Mark Kohut]

from SLATE review of Franzen's Freedom, surprising me. Review calling him the 
Tolstoy of the internet era:

storytelling in them, and The Corrections bristled with Pynchonesque subplots 
that hilariously anatomized extreme social malfunction

in a novel of social realism, are subplots really "pynchonesque"?



----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, August 30, 2010 1:08:49 AM
Subject: Re: Chronic City??? final thoughts

I liked the Corrections. Not great, not a revelation, but solid engaging 
storytelling, real craftsmanship.
I never read Motherless Brooklyn. Maybe he is getting worse instead of better.
On Aug 30, 2010, at 12:46 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Motherless Brooklyn was loads of fun, though...
> 
> 
> 
> all kinds of spoilers follow:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ok, the actor dude was being utilized by the mayor and so forth as a
> news story husband to I guess draw interest to the space station?
> 
> a-and, he actually knew the astronaut lady when he was a sensitive
> (but not gay) kid back home in Indiana
> 
> and, because he was supposedly so stoned out that he did not catch on
> until the very end, we are meant, perhaps, to tie his inattention to
> (or blame it on) his stoner habits and his punk-litterateur friend, as
> being exemplars of the trends to which (to its detriment, perhaps) the
> eyes of the cultured West were drawn, as they were simultaneously
> drawn away from the spectacle of "man's progress into Space"
> 
> a-and the one guy is thinking about raiding the cyberworld to get the
> chaldrons, thus putting all kinds of emotional energy into something
> rather sterile, and everybody's fallen away from reality...
> 
> That is, as David Bowie said, this ain't rock'n'roll, this is
> (de-)genocide...a decky-dance...
> 
> Motherless Brooklyn: Lethem's "Secret Integration"
> 
> Chronic City his V. -- or maybe his "Entropy" -- ie, you've got the
> upper room (space, where the ladyfriend's at), and you've got the
> downstairs where the party's at (the loony guy's crib, where you've
> got the makings of a Whole Sick Crew, when you factor in the lawyer
> guy, his ladyfriend, and the bum who turns out to be a computer
> adept), and you've also got the Street where the Tiger is running
> loose and chewing up stuff...I really wish the waitress would've
> managed to escape, though...
> 
> and I miss the presence of a Stencilian POV...
> 
> Personally, I wouldn't rule out ol' Lethem following up with somethin'
> better, but he's kinda rough on his dramatis personae -
> 
> I looked in Wikipedia because I was confusing him with Jonathan
> Franzen - then remembered kinda perusing The Corrections, and thinking
> he was rather tough on his characters too...
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> Well i forced myself to finish the Lethem Novel. I will never read another
>> of his books. Truly , painfully dreadful.  Ineptly using fake suspense to
>> ineptly sustain  fake introspection to reveal  the warm goo at the bottom of
>>  a con job. It doesn't entertain, It doesn't  engage emotionally, it doesn't
>> reveal or challenge intellectually;  it is a book jacket con job through and
>> through, a clever Hollywood outline without a soul. Even though it is a
>> library book I still feel as though my pocket was picked.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>