Greil Marcus on Inherent Vice, and other Book Recommendations

[Michael Bailey]

(spoiler of sorts if you're planning to read _The Last of Her Kind_ ,
though not the kind of spoiler that would spoil it for me...)

> Thomas Beshear wrote:
>> Great book. Wish more people knew about it.
>> I also like a novel that came out about the same time -- The Last of Her
>> Kind by Sigrid Nunez.

The diamond purity of principle cuts thru the glass house

parallels drawn - not only to Simone Weil, but to the young Saint
Teresa, by way of Middlemarch, which I bought and keep meaning to
read, and from which the title comes - the narrator's moved by a
sentence in Middlemarch:
"That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly
not the last of her kind."

So is she saying that because of the materialism implicit in America,
epitomized by _Gatsby_, nobody else is likely to aspire to
uncompromising and uncomfortable saintliness of that type?

But in the book-ending ruminations on Gatsby (the narrator had written
- on crank in college - a paper on why Gatsby is not a great book and
later her daughter gets to read it and disagrees) she sets
Ann-the-radical's adherence to the egalitarian ideals formed in her
teens equal to Gatsby's different but similar obsession with social
climbing, and expresses her willingness to be romanced by not Gatsby
but Gatsby's narrator...so it isn't quite that simple.

And some really good stuff on the 60s, woohoo!!

And Catholic and Christian imagery pops up in quite a few places to
good effect.  I'd read another book by her, I think.