From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[John Bailey]

I finished The Sellout yesterday and it might be a Great American Novel
because I couldn't for the life of me get into it. Felt like there was so
much I wasn't clicking with simply because I don't live in the country it's
about.
Absolutely deserves consideration by Pynchon fans, though. I think
Pynchon's work is very often about the US in ways that people from the US
might not see so clearly.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 6:18 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Follow-up. I was suggesting near-contemporary works ala Rich's original.
> and, it is only the superficiality of the marketing hook---and it is
> incorrect--if
> the stunts-lit you refer to, refers to* Ducks, Newburyport. *It is that the
> way
> Ulysses or Woolf are, that is it is NOT. It is a grand style.
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:47 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >>>
> >>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>