one great short story writer, they say, who has complex plots it seems

ish mailian ishmailian at gmail.com
Fri Feb 26 15:40:57 CST 2016


The fact that P never published a short story he'd written after these
Slow Learners may suggests that the short story is not a length that
he excels in. The failure of "The Crying of Lot 49", a short on
steroids, supports this conjecture. But who knows? Maybe he's got a
book full of shorts that will dazzle us. I doubt it though. Pynchon's
shorts are not weak merely because of the juvenile attitudes and the
college boy craft of fiction, they simply can't let Pynchon do what he
does best: write hysterical high modernism.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 6:39 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> When one---I---think more clearly of complexly plotted short story
> writers, and esp for UNDER THE ROSE day, I see why TRP's comparison
> with Le Carre is less weird than my stupidity.
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Alice Munro came to mind as well.
>>
>> 2016-02-26 11:51 GMT+01:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> One restriction she had little time for, however, was sticking to a
>>> single point of view. Almost all her stories are written in the third
>>> person, and almost all of them access the thoughts of multiple characters.
>>> Sometimes she flicks briefly into the thoughts of an incidental character
>>> (in The Letter Writers it is a nosy neighbour who intrudes on Emily’s
>>> lunch), while elsewhere she cycles more methodically through a story’s cast,
>>> building a scene from multiple perspectives. Oasis of Gaiety (1951), about a
>>> boozy afternoon party, is a bravura example.
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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