proximoception | (no subject)

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.

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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.

Edited 2009-07-01 10:57 (UTC)

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.

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."

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.