Greatest Living Author?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Laura Kelber uttered on TRP:

 > Greatest Living Author


Still think that Gravity's Rainbow belongs - together with 
Slaughterhouse 5, Ubik, Blood Meridian, The Runaway Soul and Infinite 
Jest - to the best American novels in the 20th century's second half, 
but everything since Vineland (nice personal epilogue, though) reads, 
though still full of interesting ideas, not so well in terms of serious 
literature. Not that I could have written it, mind you! It's just that I 
recently re-read IV in translation and then re-re-read it in original, 
thinking: My goodness! What a flat book. The Bill Millard essay (thanks 
again!) is great, true, but it is - let's face it! - more about 
architecture, urban space and land development in general, picking up IV 
pieces for reasons of illustration. Millard is not interested in 
Pynchon's style and he openly admits to find the plot irrelevant. 
Inherent Vice doesn't reveal much on second and third read; actually it 
begs for the Hollywood movie adaption. Also was able to finish - Uff! - 
my regular first-to-last-page read of Against the Day. Hhmm ... The 
Ostende parts (still think that they stem from an early draft written by 
the time of GR) are kinda good, and Cyprian is an interesting character. 
But the book is far far too long, and I certainly won't repeat my M&D 
mistake to read it a third time. Regarding those Iceland parts I may say 
that - although I'd be the first person to welcome a 
straight-into-the-face HPL parody of, say, 12 or 15 pages - no author, 
dead or alive, should try to compete with Lovecrafts's "At the Mountains 
of Madness". It's - perhaps together with "The Colour Out of Space" - 
his most brilliant text, and Pynchon's parody is rather lame. However, 
CoL 49 is a nice novella announcing the Rainbow, and very few authors in 
their mid twenties managed to bring out a debut novel like V. The King 
is dead, long live the King!

KFL