NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

[Erik T. Burns]

doubtless she still has that "relationchip" on her shoulder....

(a lot of Kakutani's reviews are all-in bets or complete folds; she knows
that no one will remember the mistakes she makes in calling the horses that
aren't runners, and that very few people are castigated for dumping on a
first/experimental/difficult novel. As long as she hits the occasional
winner, and it's cool; she can go on limning the collective readership for
decades - see http://harpers.org/archive/2003/12/limnphomaniac/.)

Meanwhile, I, a humble reader, am hating this book The Infernal by Mark
Doten, which supposedly got some good reviews (The Millions loved it).
Maybe I'm just getting old.



On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 1:18 PM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
wrote:

>   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
>
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