Jennifer Egan on TRP and the Nobel Prize

[Tom Beshear]

Oh, lots of people compared Inherent Vice to Elmore Leonard novels. It was an obvious, if superficial, similarity. Pynchon was definitely working in that vein.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Kohut 
  To: Erik T. Burns ; alice wellintown 
  Cc: pynchon -l 
  Sent: Friday, October 07, 2011 11:12 AM
  Subject: Re: Jennifer Egan on TRP and the Nobel Prize


  just a bit from me on Ms. Egan. I have had the chance to interact with
  her just a bit online and I will just suggest that she is perhaps overly serious
  bordering on earnest...(as I have been called) .....and I do think that perhaps
  she has blind spots re: humor...and/or   comic novels......

  I have posted before some tales of writers dissing other writers' books...
  Tolstoy to Chekhov: "Your plays are as bad as Shakespeare's" and he
  wasn't joking....Gide rejecting Swann's Way when he was a publisher's reader,
  ole T(ough) S(hit) Eliot proclaming Hamlet a failure and Coriolanus one 
  of Shakey's greatest, Nabokov's many creative distastes
  ..............I might call this the 'anxiety' of one writer's deepest 
  creativity resisting the deepest creativity of another's.......or whatever.....

  I was reminded of Ms. Egan's prediliction by her comparison: who else compared
  Inherent Vice to Elmore Leonard?.....never occurred to me...nor, I don't think, to
  any reviewers, except as they spoke of the mystery genre.......

  And I'd bet TRP might like Elmore's work for what it is............but more 
  overly serious speculating......







  From: Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>
  To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
  Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
  Sent: Friday, October 7, 2011 10:13 AM
  Subject: Re: Jennifer Egan on TRP and the Nobel Prize

  > Must their last gasp
  > coincide with the final word of the opus maestro?

  In Gaddis' case this almost literally true, with _Agapé Agape_.

  I can't remember when I stopped caring (much) about the Nobel Prize
  winner; there was a time I would run out and at least try to read a
  book or two of each year's winner. Haven't done that for a very long
  time (aside from Saramago, for personal reasons, and definitel Garcia
  Marquez; I don't think I could name five of the past 20 years without
  the brain prosthetic aid of Wikipedia).



  On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 11:19 AM, alice wellintown
  <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
  > I'm so glad they didn't give it to Dylan. I love Dylan, but he aint no
  > poet; he's a song writer and he's got lots of awards for writing
  > songs.
  > I can't think of an author that got the nobel for literature but
  > shouldn't have. Sure, they missed some. Even Babe Ruth missed some.
  >
  >> Erik says:
  >>
  >>>> They didn't give a Nobel to Gaddis. That shows you
  >>>> what the prize is worth.
  >>
  >> But they did give it to Beckett, Faulkner and Thomas Mann.
  >


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