NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

[matthew cissell]

  TP's reputation was established early, built mostly on his novels
(since this is what inicially brought him to the wider public) and of
course the 'other bits' e.g., the mexico escape story, Corey accepting
the National Book award on his behalf and so on. So, if Pynchon is
accepted as a great writer then his first three novels are canonical,
and of course they are widely studied. It may come as no surprise that
with Vineland (and its percieved change in style) there was a shift
toward more negative criticism, for example Frank Kermode's review.
But do you know how many weeks VL was on the NYT best seller list? 13
weeks and it got to #2! Folks, that's the best TP has done by the
popular standard of the NYT BS list. (And, yes, I know that book sales
are not all that counts.) However, this isn't exactly about TP.

    You see almost one year after VL came out, another writer from
TP's cohort wrote a book that recieved the following:
      "Of all the postmodernist writers, ___________ is probably the
funniest and most malicious, mixing up broad social and political
satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays
that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our
relationchip to it"

   Now, who can name the critic and what s/he was writing about? Do
you give up? It was...




Michiko Kakutani in the study with the fountain pen that killed the...
oh wait sorry. Scratch that. Michiko did write the above glowing
criticism but it was back in 1987 for a different book by the same
author, the publisher just decided to put it on the back of the then
new book. Oh, what book you ask? Well the Michiko blurb was put on the
dust cover of Robert Coover's 1991 "Pinocchio in Venice". You say you
haven't read it. Well, you can probably live without it. Anthony
Burgess gave it a fair but not glowing review. But let's see how they
stand up to the test of time. One way to do that is by checking
Nielson numbers or something like that. I use Amazon numbers since
they are easy to get.
 Today Vineland is at #89,153.  Pinocchio in Venice is at #750,363; &
it never got on the NYT BSL.

Along with this backward glance I'll mention an article from the
Guardian newspaper, "Rereading: Vineland by TP" (July 31, 2010). In it
Andy Beckett writes, "Its [VL's] warnings about the capacity for
repressiveness of US governments also read well now." This
rediscovered appreciation for  Pynchon is understandable, and not only
due to the times we live in. When VL came out (appearing as the latest
position of the author) it could only pale in comparison for those
like Kermode who found it lacking when put next to GR. However, now VL
stands in relation not only to those novels that came before but also
those that came after and as such it has an interesting linking
position in the constellation of Pynchon's work.

  It should be clear that Michiko has bet the wrong way on what writer
stands tallest in the cohort that includes Pynchon, Coover, Barth,
Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Gerald Vizenor, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Robbins
and many more. She should be happy Jack Green isn't around today.

ciao
mc otis
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l