[lbo-talk] Brit lit goes to hell

[Jim Straub]

My man Pynchon is pretty out on the left, but with more apparent
sympathies for anarchism than any particular brand of communism or
whatever.  Also his status as a secret recluse who may or may not
exist prevents him from playing an active role as a public politically
engaged intellectual I guess.  Many of our contemporary fiction
writers seem to be vaguely left, but none that I can think of hew to a
particular organization or socialist tendency.

But the strangest, and in my opinion best, development at the nexus of
politics and literature is the crew of crime writers who are mixing
left critique, social realism and neo-noir to write some of the best
novels and tv shows out there.  Pelecanos, Price, Lippman, Simon,
Lehane... besides the Wire, which I of course love fiercely, their
crime novels are so great!  I'm reading Clockers by Richard Price
right now and I'm amazed it doesn't get more regard among leftists and
literatis alike.  Seriously one of the best novels I've read in years.

 Mike Davis emailed me once to say, "if you like the Wire so much, you
need to read clockers".  Right on the money.

Terry Eagleton is so cool!  I wish the US had one of him.


> I'm racking my brains to think if any current American novelists qualify as radical in this article's sense.