Comments on: Gnostic Paranoia

By: Eric Maroney

Eric Maroney — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:43:31 +0000

Bellow died in 2005. His last novel, published in 2000. So I would count that as recent. He is considered ‘old fashioned,’ in that he has more or less shunned post modern tricks. You should read Roth’s The Counter Life. It is filled with post-modern conceits, but leaves nothing out. It is without mercy. I’ve thought of this book in the last few days, and even flipped through it again. In its execution and style you would find it satisfying.

By: jonfrankel

jonfrankel — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:35:44 +0000

i think what i mean is: Roth would be my ideal in some ways of the contemporary author who articulates emotion and place. It may be a narrow slice, but at his best you get torrential language, antagonism, intelligence, lust, paranoia. That’s what I’m after. Not cool, quiet, limited, serene, objective, removed, distant.

By: jon

jon — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:02:34 +0000

Is Bellow still a contemporary? I hope so, since like William T Vollman I regard anything written after 1798 as being contemporary. But I was thinking of postwar, post-sixties writers like Chabon and Lethem. I agree that the memoir has along with oprah et al and reality television flooded us with bathos. that’s not what i had in mind. i do feel leaving that everything unsaid, up to the reader’s interpretation, has gone too far. One of the things writing can do, fiction and drama, is articulate spiritual and emotional states so that people become aware of themselves and their world in deeper, more complicated ways, precisely because our emotional/spiritual vocabulary is so shaped by pop psychology, new age crap, television, self help books etc. there’s that moment at the end of Playing Richard when the homeless man says to Al pacino, ‘Shakespeare teaches us how to feel.’ thanks for reading, of course!

By: cara

cara — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:28:21 +0000

I’m inclined to agree with Eric on this. I think there is an unfortunate explosion of contemporary writers expressing their emotional lives, no matter how pedestrian. This is the era of the memoir afterall, and the dominant aesthetic has bled into literature. I also think that some of the most sentimental writing has been done by those who left things unsaid. The “stoicism” of Hemmingway for example. Anyway. I love the poem of course and loved it when you first emailed it to me.

By: Eric Maroney

Eric Maroney — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:01:09 +0000

All recent American writers leave things unsaid? An interesting idea. I don’t know if I agree completely. Maybe a slice of contemporary writers hold back because of some artistic or emotional squeamishness. But I just finished Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and thought of you often while reading. It said so much about the American/human experience. Very little was left unsaid, in fact.