[lbo-talk] Faulkner/Pynchon (was: Charles Bowden)

magcomm magcomm at ix.netcom.com
Thu Jan 20 09:11:03 PST 2011



> I agree with all of what you say here, but I think I know what
Joanna's getting at. Pynchon is completely unsentimental and doesn't give the reader a lot to hold on to or a temporary refuge to hide in. He's not Dickens. Or even Faulkner.

I agree that Pynchon is unsentimental, but when I first read "V" as a teenager, tears rolled down my face as I finished the chapter entitled "Mondaugen's Story" (and to quote Billy Wilder: I laugh at "Hamlet"). Pynchon along with Faulkner seem to me to be writers who are so capacious that their works rather than providing refuge for a reader, grasp the reader in a robust embrace of experience and intellect.

In contrast, DeLillo is a writer that I find "cold" - precise and sharp prose, but distancing, as if as a reader I am to look but not touch.

Brian



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