Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

The California novels are, as Rich noted, too close to the author, and
maybe too close to us as well. There is little opportunity for the
author to spin yarns that, as Nabokov sez of Major Autrhors, send
planets spinning.


P writes best from a fantastick distance, a distance he establishes
using traditonal elements of fiction, such as setting and parody,
postmodern techniques, and his style. Style is what makes Pynchon,
Pynchon and Not DeLillo or Coover or Nabokov or Swift or the Bronte
Sisters; it is a what we recognize as his unique way of making
fiction.  It is what James Wood hates about Pynchon and what we love
about him. The long sentence from V. is a good example. In fact, as
critics have pointed out, the re-working of chapters and scenes in V.
show us a slow learner developing a mature style that will, as P notes
in his honest critique of CL49, evaporate in his first California
novel (or whateber CL49 is, surely not a novel), but return, as if
repressed, with his second major romance, GR.

Fiction making, again, drawing on that famous Nabokov Lecture, is
about choices:

Shall I project a world or not?
If I do, will I name it? What name is best?
Will there be any weather in this book (Mark Twain)?

The choice of a large canvas is a good one for P. Like Jackson
Pollack, and others, P works best with a huge canvas. He needs to keep
dripping his jazz on and moving it about, working into the
abstractions he expresses.

Ever read Vonnegut's Bluebeard? Well, Vonnegut is no Pynchon, and
unlike his protagonist, Rabo, Vonnegut works best with a small canvas.

Parody is a key to P. Some early critics figured out that V. is, in
part anyway, a parody of modern realist fiction. And it works and
doesn't get in the way.But in IV, the parody fails. Parody, a long and
exhausted thread here, is not a negative statement in P, so P is
honoring his hardboiled influences, but he doesn't do Dicks well
enough to sustain it for, whatever IV is (surely not a beach novel),
300 pages.

The prose. Sure, P writes better prose in the big books. I can find
countless examples. Mondaugan's story blows away every sentence in
CL49. And most everthing young P wrote. There are no wonderful, though
lotz of  heavy-handed passages in TSI, and the dream-toxication
surrealisms of the Jazzman are full of flatulence and false notes, as
P notes in his critique of that Slow Learner,  but the parody, of
Twain, and the whole sick crew, and the bomb, yes, TSI is about bomb
making and blowing shit up, makes the tale a little gem. But Slothop,
the name arrives in TSI, along with the rocket research, is there in
sketchform, but the canvas is too small, the fantastick distance, not
there.

To layer set-pieces and all that erudition and talent, slicing film
and splicing film onto the canvas as the German film makers in the US,
those techniques we see in the Wizard of Oz, writing parody, playfully
punning sophomoric slips-Freudian....so on, this takes a big stage.
Imagine Wagner with a sketch pad? I can not.

The mythos, the magical, if not realism, whatever we may name it,
needs a fantastick distance and a large canvas.