A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[kelber at mindspring.com]

As a person who struggles with severe bouts of depression, I avoid relentlessly-depressing writers like O'Connor.  Had to read her in high school (Everything That Rises Must Converge), and vowed I'd never willingly subject myself to her darkness again.  As a rabid Pynchon fan, I'm not looking for fluffy feel-good shit.  But I don't want to read a series of stories whose sole purpose is to prove, however eloquently or wittily, that everything sucks.  I'm also wary of novelists who throw in gratuitous horrors to give their otherwise tepid work dramatic weight.  Which novelists am I talking about?  I don't even know - I avoid writers who might even potentially be capable of doing this.  Books with blurbs using phrases such as "after a horrifying tragedy, Hubert has to come to terms with ..." and so on.  Pynchon writes of horrors, but he simultaneously hands out steady doses of intriguing mind-expanding prose and side explorations, by way of anesthetic.  And I know he loves dogs too much to kill or torture them gratuitously.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>Sent: Nov 29, 2012 10:31 AM
>To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found
>
>thanks for the suggestion alice. considering my mood lately maybe I
>should read more of her. and apologies for being a dick
>
>rich
>
>On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 6:07 PM, alice wellintown
><alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> No probs, bros, I don't spect nothin less round this here list of
>> late. But it was a great thing I wrote about grace; if you know what I
>> mean. See, grace and free will are tropes that P just be playin wit.
>>
>>  Now that O'Connor is another thing all together. She ain't messing
>> round with it; she's dead in the eye serious. What a fine writer is
>> Flannery O'Connor; her shorts are tight, her legs, even when they be
>> stretched wooden ones, be  long.
>>
>> http://www.csub.edu/english/engl375/o'connor.htmlx