Pynchon/McEwan

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

What's puzzling me about the relation of Pynchon and McEwan is the 
asymmetry of it all. When McEwan, whose early books I appreciate,
was accused of literary theft, Pynchon wrote an open letter to defend 
him. He does not do things like that often. But when McEwan wrote
the obituary for Updike, he painted the landscape of US-American 
literature and didn't say a single word about Pynchon:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/12/on-john-updike/

" ... and American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, 
Bellow and Mailer, is a leveled plain,
  with one solitary peak guarded by Roth."

While Bellow and Roth can be considered as playing in the same league 
with Pynchon, this is certainly not the case with Mailer, although
he was a great American intellectual. But implicitly saying that Mailer 
writes better than Pynchon is sheer nonsense, no?

So I do not quite understand what's going on there. Anxiety of Influence?

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_mcewan.html


On 25.09.2011 08:29, Albert Rolls wrote:

> A few other sites make that claim about P getting that book from 
> McEwan but nothing I can find quickly that is citable. Anyone else 
> have any idea where Mcewan said such a thing?

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