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

[Mark Kohut]

One more bit of 'nothing but net' speculation. McEwan got known and first
published
in America in that late 60-s early 70-s literary magazine, The American
Review. This mag was
published and distributed like a paperback book and got lots of publicity.
It reached the young me
far from NY.

I know this story. The writer Jerome Charyn had a girlfriend who worked at
this magazine. Jerome
himself edited (with others) a literary magazine called Fiction, which also
came to my consciousness,
although much less publicized and sold.

One day Jerome and his womanfriend went to lunch with Faith Sale and a
young man named Tom. This is
before GR. The three of them talked about new writers from all over the
world. Names and talents
in the mind of editors working on such magazines. The young thin man was
silent.

Only when GR was published did Jerome and his friend figure out who Tom
was.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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