NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

[rich]

Hardly fair to knock Coover for that, man

rich

On Monday, March 16, 2015, 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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