MISC & IRRELEVANT: Pynchon's friend, Ian McEwan, whom he has defended publicly,

[Mark Kohut]

OK, granted. I can't prove this claim, so it is only speculation.
But it is based on this: we see exactly no other instances where he comes
out in public for a living writer whom
he does not know. He has also spoken of Salman Rushdie, who has written
about knowing him (a little). We have seen
his expressed loyalty to friends and people he knows, from college mates
and acquaintances thru the late M.H. Abrams.
I might even argue such is part of his vision.

Ian did say in an interview that "it is like Pynchon being called a
recluse. He jut dislikes talking to the press which
is not the same thing." Yes, we've read this elsewhere but in this
interview McEwan says it as if he's heard it, not
read it. Again, admittedly, nothing more than circumstantial feeling here.

We know he did have dinners and meet with some during his time in England.
I would speculate that McEwan's
science education and love for it and some of McEwan's early fiction
resonated with Pynchon. McEwan did allude
postively to Pynchon in another interview when he speculated that Bellow,
Updike, Mailer and Pynchon would
NOT neglect writing of a Wall in their fictional writing space if one
existed. I might suggest that he and McEwan had talked
substantively of borrowing from history but reusing in fiction.

I will also speculate from my butt that when McEwan's fiction moved to
old-fashioned realism, from his irreal psychic
explorations of darker impulses and meanings, Pynchon would have considered
it...not as interesting, maybe not as good.
I will also speculate that McEwan might not have "liked' later---to that
point---Pynchon as much as earlier Pynchon for the reason of his [McEwan's]
own artistic changes and beliefs in why. So, he McEwan, no longer thought
him equal to Roth, the only American writer he noted.

And, one can still be friends with someone with whom one disagrees, or with
whom one honestly expresses his reasons re work that disappoints. And, as I
speculate, the disappointment might be mutual.

But, of course, no provable cause & effect here; I may be projecting
everything.



On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 5:56 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> You keep calling McEwan here "Pynchon's friend" again and again because
> Pynchon defended him against charges of plagiarism in 2006.
>
> But how come then that "friend" McEwan, in his obituary for Updike,
> describes the landscape of US literature like this?
>
> > And now this masterly blasphemer, whose literary schemes and pretty
> conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean, is gone, and American
> letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer, is a
> leveled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth. We are coming to the
> end of the golden age of the American novel in the twentieth century’s
> second half. <
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/03/12/on-john-updike/
>
> For McEwan, Pynchon seems to play in the same league as, let's say, John
> Grisham or Stephen King.
>
> So I do not believe that Pynchon and McEwan are friends; Pynchon just
> thought the plagiarism charges - "Fascinating topic, literary theft"
> (SL-intro) - to be wrong and felt the need to utter this.
>
>
>
> On 18.06.2016 13:38, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> has a new novel coming that will be narrated from a womb.
>
>
>
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