V---2nd, Chap 13, still.....on Schlemielness.

[alice wellintown]

Right, the novel of ideas. That old Nabokov at Father Mapple's pulpit
spitting, from the back of the Russian throat, invective gainst
writers who would, as unkind readers do, start off with some
preconceived idea about what a book is about and fuck it up from the
start. The example, reader of Flaubert or James (condemnation of the
middle class or some such?), should be, like Mapple's congregation of
isoladoes, forced into the en-mass reader while the high priest pulls
up his rope ladder and casts himself away with holy saint Paul till
god spits him upon dry American motel parking lots and fills his book
mobile with Baedekers and Hollywood dialogues. Waxwings and Pale Fires
never took flight or burned in Pheonix or Ashbury Park, and poor
Vlad's poetry made Melville's look like butterflies. Don't imagine a
young kid with piss and vinegar in his veins never could get or even
hear half of what that Mapple was moping on about.