Bloom on Vineland

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/30/2012 12:20 PM, Carvill John wrote:
> I had a good long look for this a few years back but never found it. 
> Maybe it wasn't online? Anyway here's the Paris Review interview in 
> which he blasts Vineland:
>
>
> "Although I’ve been reading extensively and writing about it over the 
> last few years, it is very difficult for me to get a steady fix on the 
> current kaleidoscope of American fiction. Our most distinguished 
> living writer of narrative fiction—I don’t think you would quite call 
> him a novelist—is Thomas Pynchon, and yet that recent book Vineland 
> was a total disaster. In fact, I cannot think of a comparable disaster 
> in modern American fiction. To have written the great story of Byron 
> the lightbulb in Gravity’s Rainbow, to have written The Crying of Lot 
> 49 and then to give us this piece of sheer ineptitude, this hopelessly 
> hollow book that I read through in amazement and disbelief, and which 
> has not got in it a redeeming sentence, hardly a redeeming phrase, is 
> immensely disheartening."

Yeah, he sounds like he's on the verge of a manic attack.  Sheer 
ineptitude.  Hopelessly hollow.  Amazement and disbelief  Not a 
redeeming sentence.  Get a grip, Harold.

P
>
>
> http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom
>
>

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