Bloom on Vineland

[Carvill John]

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."


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


 		 	   		  
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