Before I write anything else, I want to alert readers to the New York Library Association’s plan to create a New York State Writers’ Hall of Fame. The hall will induct its first five writers next April, at the NYLA’s first Empire State Book Festival (for more on that, click here), and the organization is encouraging people to nominate writers who are native New Yorkers or have lived significant parts of their lives in New York to the hall of fame. There are plenty of great writers to choose from — Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton and Albany resident William Kennedy come immediately to mind — and the winners will be announced on Oct. 15 in Niagara Falls. Click here to send the NYLA your nominees.
Speaking of New York writers, I’ve decided to take another crack at “V,” the 1961 novel by Thomas Pynchon, who was born in Glen Cove, Long Island. I tried to read this book in college, but abandoned it early on. I wasn’t alone — according to my post-modern literature professor, three-quarters of the class got depressed and quit reading before the midway point. But I didn’t remember getting depressed. In fact, I remembered liking “V.” So why had I stopped reading it? Surely there was a reason.
When I started re-reading “V,” I was still mystified. “This book is great!” I thought. And it was great. The first two chapters were exhilarating — dense, darkly comic, imaginative prose, written in a freewheeling, intellectually stimulating style that paved the way for later post-modernists such as (Ithaca native) David Foster Wallace, (Peekskill native) T. Coraghessan Boyle and (Brooklyn native) Jonathan Lethem. I couldn’t wait to read more about protagonist Benny Profane, his gang of friends — known as the Whole Sick Crew — and their various misadventures.
But then I hit chapter 3, and it was a slog. Titled “In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations,” chapter 3 is comprised of eight sections, told from different points of view, which tell a story of “murder and intrigue” in Egypt during the late 18th century, according to Wikipedia. I cite Wikipedia because I found chapter 3 so thoroughly confusing that I decided to go online and see if someone could tell me what in god’s name was going on.
Anyway, I read chapter 3 a couple of times in a desperate attempt to understand it; soon after, I hit a dog-eared page marking the spot where I’d stopped reading “V” in college, and suddenly understood why I’d walked away from the book. Pynchon’s exhilarating use of language had quickly become exhausting. But this time, I forged ahead, and “V” soon regained its footing, returning to the absurdist, poetically profane territory of the first two chapters. I won’t lie — some of the writing still makes me want to bang my head against a wall. But for every maddening sentence like this:
“Such was the (as it were) Jacobean etiology of Esther’s eventual trip to Cuba; which see.”
There’s a poignant, descriptive, clearly written passage like this:
“So in January 1956 Benny Profane showed up again in New York. He came into town at the tag-end of a spell of false spring, found a mattress at a downtown flophouse called Our Home, and a newspaper at an uptown kiosk; roamed the streets late that night studying the classified by streetlight. As usual nobody wanted him in particular.”
In other literary news, I finally finished Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,” a Man Booker prize winner in 2006. A colorful and vivid tale set in both India and the United States, “The Inheritance of Loss” tells the story of a teenage girl named Sai, who lives with her reclusive, bitter grandfather in his isolated estate in the Himalayan foothills, and of a young man Biju, an illegal immigrant eking out an existence in New York City. I admired “The Inheritance of Loss,” but never felt fully engaged by it. The writing was good, but I never really cared all that much about the characters — for some reason, they never came alive for me.
But people love this book, and it now takes its place on my list of Highly Acclaimed Recent Novels That I Liked, But Didn’t Love. This list includes:
1. “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer
2. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon
3. “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith
4. “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
5. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
These are good books and all, but I just don’t love them. But I’m clearly in the minority, because everybody else does.
Got a comment? A tough read? Add your thoughts below or e-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.
