Homer & Langley // Adams in V.?

[alice wellintown]

I'm not gonna quib a little wit dat. Thanks Thomas, for posting the
letter; it is a far more useful statement than we might put it to use
here arguing classification and genre. It's obvious to anyone who has
spent half as much time as we have reading P's texts, prose fiction
and prose, that P writes historical fiction. do I contradict my self?
no. some one, not shakespeare calld some of his plays history plays.
we still call some of shakespeare's plays histories. I guess we could
call shakespeare an historical playwrite. shakespeare never said it.
who cares? I would not call P an historical novelist. why? because, it
doesn't make a good thesis if it's a fact.

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Thomas Beshear <tbeshear at insightbb.com> wrote:
> The full text of Thomas Pynchon's letter defending Ian McEwan against
> plagiarism allegations can be found at this link. Just click on the image of
> the letter to enlarge:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/books/07pync.html
>
> One finds the following sentence:
> "Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some
> obligation to accuracy."
> From that, I assume P believes himself to be a historical novelist. That's
> not all he is, of course, but it's one thing.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "alice wellintown"
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 9:17 PM
> Subject: Homer & Langley // Adams in V.?
>
>
> A fine read. But there is something about the newsreel/real that irks
> me, something about the Jewish Bronx born author's voice that jerks me
> away from Homer and into Doctorow's historisizing.
>
> BTW, I wouild not call P an historical novelist; he writes, when he
> writes not for money or from a political soap box, american romance &
> satire.
>
> NY Times; a review by schillinger of Homer & Langley by e.l. doctorow.
>
> When Homer hears of a newspaper photo­graph of Langley “shuffling down
> Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a
> shawl he’d made from a burlap sack, and house slippers,” he knows his
> brother’s sanity has taken a nose dive but blames it on civic outrage.
> “I will say in my brother’s defense that he had a lot on his mind. It
> was a period of appalling human behavior.”
>
> Of course, if disturbing headlines were enough to justify such a
> reaction, there would be what the police call a “Collyer situation” on
> every city block. When Homer, in a bid for empathy, asks, “What could
> be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke?” readers caught
> up in Doctorow’s tender, lushly drawn narrative may feel a pang,
> remembering Langley’s Theory of Replacements and wondering what slot
> history has in store for them. Yet after the novel’s spell ebbs, they
> will probably, guiltily, revert to the more instinctive response to
> Homer’s plea. What’s worse than being turned into a joke? Dying in
> your house buried under 100 tons of trash. The achievement of
> Doctorow’s masterly, compassionate double portrait is that it succeeds
> for 200 pages in suspending the snigger, elevating the Collyers beyond
> caricature and turning them into creatures of their times instead of
> figures of fun.h
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Schillinger-t.html
>