This section contains 12,158 words (approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace," in Critique, Vol. 38, No. 1, Fall, 1996, pp. 12-37.
In the following essay, LeClair contrasts three roughly contemporaneous younger novelists against their innovative forbears, especially Thomas Pynchon, and makes his case for a new and scientifically more astute voice in American literature that broadens and deepens the commentary and critique begun by the so-called metafictionists.
Since the publication of V. in 1963, when Thomas Pynchon was twenty-six, he has been the reigning, if now aging, prodigy of contemporary American fiction, the gifted author of two prodigious novels, the 492-page V. and the encyclopedic Gravity's Rainbow. Reviewing the more modest Vineland in 1990, Richard Powers addressed Pynchon as a composer of bed-time stories: "So tell us another one, Pop, before it gets too dark". Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace all admit within their novels their filial debt to...
This section contains 12,158 words (approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page) |
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