Chabon mentions Pynchon

[alice wellintown]

> Seattle Art Museum has done a striking thing. It has removed all works
> by modern male artists from its galleries and filled them with works
> by 20th- and 21st-century women artists from Georgia O'Keeffe to
> Pipilotti Rist.

I suppose one of the reasons GR was such a smash with critics,
academics, and if I dare say, the male readers of influence who, after
the great wars,  longed for a massive novel of great power and scope,
something that these readers of the great and powerful wizards of
modernism did not find, at least not easily, as all the genius of the
earlier movement died or dried up, or sat at the edge of the Thames, a
self-exiled Tiresias/Oedipus in Molly's bloomers, with wrinkled man
boobs, a tattered Byzantium cloak upon a stick in a Room of her/his
own and wept waiting for Godot to wipe forever the tears from the eyes
of all those young swains who would never sing the song of
contemporary culture, but only withdraw, turn, because they could not
hope to hope, turn, only turn, not even slouch toward or away from
that rough God or Beast, and give birth to parochial defeatism. Of
course,  genius and wizardry are more readily recognized when the
magical winds have blown away the blue tarps exposing the rafters and
beams of a new construction. Of course, postmodern, or whatever
critical term or phrase we may use, like a man with a hammer who
cannot resist nailing everything with it, clawing at heads, ripping
the floors up, exposing the constructed foundations of literary
history, severing the the hurricane bolts, and letting fly out of
Kansas all that was recognized for its greatness and significance,
then collapsing all, like a house of subjective consensus weighed down
by the value-loaded and culturally specific meaning makings of men
who, while not mad or locked in an attic, were, without quite knowing
it, over the rainbow. Down the rainbow road we go, past pluralism and
perspectivism and relativism to the exhausted and exhausting language
of James Joyce & Co. only to find ourselves dying, as we lay and lie
and listen to the Thames and the evensong....till the Screaming comes
across the page....