Not even close to Pynchon

[ish mailian]

That's a different point. One I agree with too. As Pynchon notes in
his Introduction to Slow Learner, the American male is a foreveryoung,
a boy who won't grow up, who won't even try, a Peter in Panland,
because, like Huck, like Ishmael, like countless others in American
culture, he rejects the adult world and all its corruption.

from Death of Adulthood in American Culture

By A.O. Scott

NYT   Sept. 11, 2014


We Americans have never been all that comfortable with patriarchy in
the strict sense of the word. The men who established our political
independence — guys who, for the most part, would be considered late
adolescents by today’s standards (including Benjamin Franklin (fig.
3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did so partly in
revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt,
unreasonable and abusive father figure. It was not until more than a
century later that those rebellious sons became paternal symbols in
their own right. They weren’t widely referred to as Founding Fathers
until Warren Harding, then a senator, used the phrase around the time
of World War I.

Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love
and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more
than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of
American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of
the library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry
Finn (fig. 4), he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and
still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The
typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run,
harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat
— anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation
of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and
responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in
our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature
and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and
infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”

Huck Finn is for Fiedler the greatest archetype of this impulse, and
he concludes “Love and Death” with a tour de force reading of Twain’s
masterpiece. What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry
Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s
innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of
the adult world.

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 8:49 AM Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was with you, ish, up to the part about america being old. This is a very young nation, run by kids that never grew up for kids who will never grow up. It is a children's den of self-centered babies who want either to be the biggest bully on the block, or to escape to a place where there are no parents who insist they behave like sapient humans.