From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Laura Kelber]

I don't have patience for literary stunts or one-joke novels - see how
closed-minded I am? GR took my mind places it had never been. Maybe there's
nowhere else to go? I got bored quickly with Beatty's novel and don't think
my eyes could stand the look of Ellman's pages. Do I really want to spend
1700 pages with a reminiscing East German in NYC? I think not. I enjoyed
reading Pnin, although it's Nabokov-lite. Currently reading The Fountain
Overflows, by Rebecca West, which I'm enjoying despite its odd forays into
the metaphysical.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:12 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I try to resist the buried nostalgia often caught in our historic
> appreciations.
>
> Although it is only new in English, Johnson's *Anniversaries* is within a
> stone's arc of GR.
> As is Lucy Ellmann's* Ducks, Newburyport *and is such a mental pleasure
> to read. Like reading GR the second time, or AtD
> after a lifetime of Pynchon.
>
> As is Beatty's *The Sellout.*
>
> And there are others.
>
> Just because GR is SOO great, the great American novel of the second half
> of its century, at least, doesn't mean
> others won't rock your world.
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:05 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Yes. I'm too cynical to indulge in hero worship, as a rule, though I've
>> probably indulged in fatuous admiration most in the literary sphere.
>> Still,
>> I've never felt an obligation to love everything that Pynchon - or Doris
>> Lessing, or Thomas Mann, or Melville or Dostoevsky - has written.
>>
>> But I doubt I'll ever encounter a book that changed my worldview as much
>> as
>> Gravity's Rainbow, and that's sad to think.
>>
>> PS - I balked at using the word "sad." A good old word that's been
>> tarnished in the tweets of the Orange Pustule.
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 9:32 AM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Soon the curtain of one's literary heroes gracing us with new work will
>> > close. The current obsessions of new and upcoming fiction writers I have
>> > found are not mine, worthy as they are. I wont be one of those grumps
>> > bemoaning the ascendance of a new generation of writers. But it does
>> sadden
>> > me a bit that soon there won't be anyone left for me to put on my
>> personal
>> > pedestal. Part of me realizes this is just natural. But I will miss the
>> > excitement  I once had.
>> > musing on a snowy winter's day
>> >
>> > rich
>> > --
>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> >
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>