At 08:17 PM 11/22/02 -0500, you wrote:
>In a message dated 11/22/02 12:11:09 PM,
tieresias@att.net writes:
>
><< I intended to address the implicit
contention that
>Ellroy's work is so transcendent that it is, in fact,
literary, and not, in
>the
>strictest sense, "genre" fiction. >>
>
>I don't recall anyone here calling his work either
transcendent or literary.
Let me quote Kerry Schooley from a few days ago for you
then:
"Something like 150 million killed in the past century. Yet
we prosper and keep counting. I can't think of another author
who so effectively catches these amoral, hysterical times. I
don't care if he (Ellroy) is an asshole."
Sounds like someone describing Ellroy as either transcendent
or literary, to me. Of course you could split hairs and say
that you don't see either of those words in what is said, but
I was responding to the entirety of the post from which I cut
and pasted the above statement.
>In fact, what I said was, love him or hate him, he is
one of the most
>important writers working in the genre. For that
reason alone, any serious
>fans of the genre should at least give him a
try.
>
>As for literature, I find Norman Mailer for one,
absolutely unreadable.
I agree. I really struggled with "The Naked and the Dead,"
and I passed on "The Executioner's Song." And hey, don't even
get me started on James Jones!
>I'll happily take American Tabloid any day of the
week.
Given a choice between "American Tabloid" and Norman Mailer's
complete body of work, I'm sure I could find something in
that large corpus which would hold my attention far better
than "American Tabloid".
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 25 Nov 2002 EST