A well-promoted novelist in this instance picked the wrong week to move on!
I've given my opinion of Bellow's work before on this thread. I respect him as a novelist, a good one. He certainly, though, didn't live up to the hype that was laid on him. (His best work was a novella-- most of his novels tended to get bogged down in cut-rate solipsistic philosophizing.)
It's a sign of the decaying position of American letters that a merely competent author has ruled for so long as our chief novelist, according to critics-- though his creative growth and imagination became stagnant over forty years ago.
The literary establishment has begun dying off. Sontag; Bellow. Who's next? (Is Updike still alive? Has anyone recently checked?)
Who will replace these cardboard titans? Jonathan Franzen? Graph the lit-establishment and it seems to be on a steep course downward.
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9 comments:
Mailer's been quiet. When Updike got that PEN award for his decades-old casuals, I got the same feeling I did when Jimmy Carter failed to appear in those Tsunami relief ads. I think Tom Wolfe is furiously scribbling his memoirs.
I've completely tuned out Mailer's name since...forever.
Does anyone know what Mailer's motivation was to help Jack Henry Abbott get out of prison in 2000?
Enlighten me, that always boggled me.
Marissa,
Mailer would (to this day, I imagine), chew off his index fingers if it made him appear tough. While in the joint, Abbott ran the lonely-hearts game on Norm, building his fantasy with letters because he had fuck-all else to do. When he got out, he couldn't stay under Mailer's wing - he had to knife a stranger because that's how real cons react to a perceived slight, even those with lit pretensions. He went back to prison, thereby bolstering Mailer's badass self-image even more.
My opinion is that the crank posts are being done by a handful of people-- the "Usual Suspects."
We know that Eggers has posted anonymously against the ULA in the past. Also that his wife has been thought to make crank phone calls.
If the identities were revealed, I don't think they'd be surprising-- the same-old characters who've done such things in the past.
Yes! It is so awesome all these people are dying! And this is the perfect opportunity for the ULA to step in and take over American literature.
All we have to do now is come up with a couple of books that tens of thousands of people are willing to spend their hard-earned money on, and read and reread and talk about. Books that encapsulate our cultural moment, that give voice to the struggle of people to survive and understand one another in a beautiful and hostile world. Now how do we do that? King? Noah? Lil' help?
"Who's next?"
Frank Conroy, director of the MFA program at Iowa.
I thought Bellow had died years ago. But I always confused him with Singer anyway.
With Joyce Carol Oatmeal our reigning queen of letters, what to expect from the lit club set?
Who can replace Kurt Vonnegut when he finally kicks the bucket? You can hear them snickering in the background, waiting their chance to kick him once he's gone.
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