NP, exactly - One for Jack Green
alice malice
alicewmalice at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 17:51:17 CDT 2015
Pinocchio in Venice far better than any of P's California books. A
brilliant tna d beautifully composed work of genius. Sorry, P fans,
but knocking other great works is simply not the way to elevate P's
rep. Hell, P is a lot like so many white boys who went to school on
Jazz.
On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:00 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>> -
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