Saunders on TRP

[alice malice]

And you posted this drivel because ....?

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just ran across it again, Bookforum 2005:
>
> George Saunders I don't think anyone has gotten closer than Thomas
> Pynchon to summoning the real audacity and insanity and scope of the
> American mind, as reflected in the American landscape. I read Pynchon all
> out of order, starting with *Vineland*, and I still remember the shock of
> pleasure I got at finally seeing the America I knew--strange shops and
> boulevards, built over former strange shops and former boulevards, all laid
> out there in valleys and dead-end forests, heaped on top of Indian
> cemeteries, peopled with nut jobs and hustlers and moral purists--actually
> present in a novel, and present not only in substance but in structure and
> language that both used and evoked the unruly, muscular complexity of the
> world itself.
>
> In Pynchon, anything is fair game--if it is in the world, it can go in the
> book. To me there is something Buddhist about this approach, which seems to
> say that since the world is capable of producing an infinity of forms, the
> novel must be capable of accommodating an infinite number of forms. All
> aesthetic concerns (style, form, structure) answer this purpose: Let in the
> world.
>
> This is why Pynchon is our biggest writer, the gold standard of that
> overused word *inclusiveness*: No dogma or tidy aesthetic rule or
> literary fashion is allowed to prefilter the beautiful data streaming in.
> Everything is included. No inclination of the mind is too small or large or
> frightening. The result is gorgeous madness, which does what great
> literature has always done--reminds us that there is a world out there that
> is bigger than us and worthy of our utmost humility and attention.
>
> I have often felt that we read to gain some idea of what God would say
> about us if someone were to ask Him what we're like. Pynchon says, through
> the vast loving catalogue he has made, that we are Excellent but need to be
> watched closely. He says there is no higher form of worship than the loving
> (i.e., madly attentive) observation of that-which-is, a form of prayer of
> which Pynchon's work is our highest example.
>
> http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html
>
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