(no subject)

[proximoception]

HB: Well, we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth, particularly with two extraordinary novels, the very savage Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which I mentioned before; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is a little long for what it does but nevertheless is the culmination of what Don can do; and, of course, the mysterious figure of Mr. Pynchon. I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century, it probably would not be something by Roth or McCarthy; it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare.

Startling upset by Mason? Though Bloom does call Blood Meridian the best book since As I Lay Dying elsewhere in the same interview. Might have some time to try M&D again next month.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

M&D is easily my favorite. When it came out HB said he loved it. Then about six months later (when I finished it) he said he thought it didn't work and while better than Vineland was a falling off. Then a couple of years later he loved it almost as much as Gravity's Rainbow. Now. more recently, it's beyond compare. I don't know as I'd call it sublime at any point, but I think it's just an amazing book. The comparison with Ashbery seems both dazzling and right to me.

I can't get myself to read a lot of DeLillo. I gave up on Underworld though maybe I should try again.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Everything in Underworld is great but not necessarily cumulatively (unless I'm missing something, which I always am). I guess the idea is for things to connect up suggestively, but they do that in life. In books we want something stronger.

[parishat.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why people like Delillo, but I find this a fault all my own; I'd like to appreciate him more than I do. He leaves me cold.

When M&D first came out, I remember, I was working for HB, typing up various essays and reviews, and we read the novel together because he was preparing a review of it (which I can't seem to locate online, but I have it on my home computer if you're interested) and politely asked me to read the novel too. I remember he had serious reservations about it. He thought it had a few good sentences but wasn't pleased overall. But I think his answer to the interviewer, quoted above, has more to do with "scale" than "full-scale." And that may be why he says now that he prefers M&D. Yet, what constitutes "scale" is another matter.

A little while later, after the review, in an interview (2000) he calls it "an awfully good book"; "I was very heartened by it."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That would be great, thank you! - that review's one of the few I haven't been able to get my hands on.

Sounds like Bloom shares some of my Pynchon ambivalence. I liked Vineland as a teenager, though, which he seems to hate a bit excessively. But that was in another country.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

It's fun that everybody likes different things when it comes to great novels. Bloom doesn't have the same opinion as Bloom for example. I wouldn't put Mason & Dixon in even the same category of achievment as Blood Meridian. I guess I forget what he means by sublime... I think he means comedy mostly. He once compared the Byron the Bulb section of Gravity's Rainbow to Duck Soup as moments of the American Sublime.

Anyway, I think Mason & Dixon is quite flawed. There's way too much exposition (like in Against the Day) that drags in paragraph after paragraph that add nothing thematically or structurally and seem to be TP not wanting to waste research he did. In Gravity's Rainbow, every detail seems to add momentum to the grand design. And, in GR, Pynchon wrangles the languages of the hard and social sciences and the occult to get the words to say what he wants to say. Sort of like Faulkner in that way of wrestling the speech. Or like Blood Meridian which borrowed that wrangling from Faulkner and took it a step beyond. (Vineland I don't like much either).