Pynchon/McEwan

[Mark Kohut]

Since today is McEwan WTF? Day, if interested check out The Guardian's Power 100 in [English] Publishing 
wherein he is #19...pretty damn hign and it has to mean his influence as well as his success, I think......

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 7:40 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon/McEwan


And I'll bet pynchon is simply more loyal to old friends than McEwan or most.
 
Look at how he always remembers them...Cornell friends, writers, teachers, etc. 

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 7:36 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon/McEwan


I link my memory of the borrowed book to an interview with McEwan--or quotes solicited---after the plaigerism charge, perhaps
when asked how Pynchon came to write that letter. 
 
And, I too, have thought about the 'asymmetry' of the friendship between them and offer this: McEwan's perspective on the kind
of fiction to write changed....early work explored some psychosocial stuff in symbolic ways not unlike some of Pynchon's work.
McEwan had a science-math background which coudda been an ice-breaker, along with Freud/Jung and our dark psyches!
 
Then, McEwan came to feel that the older-fashioned realism was truer---embodying in himself the change that a writer like Franzen articulated.
 
O think that maybe that "more mature" McEwan, final judger of other writers, now felt that Pynchon's non-abandoned stylistic ways were
lesser ways........McEwan accepted the return to realism shift in critical judgment championed most by such as James Wood. 
 
In the United States, I know one place McEwan's early work was championed to effect was in the now-defunct New America Review,
where I first read him. I also know of a lunch involving TRP ( disguised as just Tom; before GR) and two people involved with that periodical.
Barthelme was in the periodical so, once again, betcha TRP read it well. 
 
 
 

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 5:30 AM
Subject: re: Pynchon/McEwan



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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