Very nice on M & D....

[alice wellintown]

AGTD makes V. look like This Side of Paradise looks next to Gatsby.
That P went to school on Fitzgerald's apprentice work to write his own
is quite ironic and certainly confirms one thing P tells us in his
Slow Learner Introduction: P was a Slow Learner. Like Fitzgerald, who
knew he had talent and was ambitious to show it off, if only to win
the heart of his Daisy (Zelda), P knew he had written something
"literate", for he had, with deliberate and manic
(paranoid--everything is connected) prose made it so. Lot49 is worse;
it suffers from the curse that destroys what is obviously P's greatest
early work ("The Secret Integration"), that is, his application of
creative writing theory. GR works because if combines P's encyclopedic
paranoia, his deliberate "make it literate" idea with a more a mature
prose American romance satire. After this, P is exhausted and can find
nothing to do.  M&D is beautiful, but it is cobbled together from more
left-over Moby-Dick --House of the Seven Gables  (i.e., GR) material.
Inherent is crap. AGTD is P's masterpiece.

Back to Beatrice and Amory.