BE #1 Amazon Best Seller in "Historical Mystery"

[Bekah]

I have a small issue with the "historical" part of the genre description.  How "historical" can 2001 be?  Pynchon and the readers of BE were all likely adults at the time and as a result have a personal involvement - not an historical one.   Precious few books are written about the times we actually live in - they're usually set at least 3 or 4 years prior often up to 10 or so.  (Suite Francois was very surprising and Pattern Recognition was similar in its chronological proximity of setting - so to speak).   

What with the speed of technology (we're now exploring the real "outer" space) I suppose history is anything that happened yesterday?  

Bekah


On Sep 15, 2013, at 6:46 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> I say give the Amazon folk credit, they nailed it. They couldn't call
> it a Romance, or those academinc terms, postmodern, high modern, or as
> Cowart does, roman fleuve, or hysterical...metafiction... so I like
> it.
> 
> The American Mystery (Tanner).
> 
> In this wonderful little book, Tanner, from the first essay on
> Emerson, which takes up this issue of Sloth and the Author, of Anarchy
> and Work, we see how Pynchon fits into this American Mystery
> tradition, again, not so Dieckensian as has been argued, nothing that
> European, but a studied son of the American Mystery.
> 
> The mystery softens the blunt instrument that is anything that would
> work on 9-11 with a bleeding political edge.