From steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp Thu Jul 1 02:13:00 1999 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id CAA40190 for ; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 02:12:59 -0700 Received: from ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp (sizcol.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp [133.33.105.11]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.06) with ESMTP id CAA02318 for ; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 02:12:57 -0700 Received: from hamapc07.sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp ([133.33.106.107]) by ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp (8.9.1+3.0W/3.7W-98122215) with SMTP id SAA11452 for ; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 18:12:25 +0900 (JST) Message-Id: <199907010912.SAA11452@ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp> Received: As Outbound on InvisiMail route 127.0.2.2to127.0.2.2:25/sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp:25 X-INVISIMAIL: No Private Key for steven@[127.0.2.1] From: "Steven J. Willett" To: classics@u.washington.edu Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:58:18 +0900 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Herodotus and Unity (was Hector and all that) In-reply-to: <3.0.5.32.19990701012731.007998d0@online.emich.edu> References: <199906300853.RAA06078@ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.11) On 1 Jul 99, at 1:27, James P. Holoka wrote: > Every week it seems some new > >talent is discovered with extravagant praise, some old talent is > >resuscitated with assurances of "genius" and some other > >patinaed talent just cruises along on the assumption it will > >eventually bump into a firm foothold on prose Parnassus. Most > >of these artists are just playing about with the tired old > >conventions of naturalism and have absolutely nothing to offer > >the world, no reason to exist and shouldn't in fact exist. > > Oaky, I'll bite: would you include in this denunciation A.S. Byatt, Pat > Barker, Martin Amis, Penelope Lively, John Fowles, William Trevor, Patrick > McCabe, Jim Harrison, John Cheever, John Updike, Maxine Hong Kingston, > Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul? (To name a few > fiction writers I like and try to find time to read.) Not Marquez, that's for sure, but the rest are mostly small beer to me. A few are harmless if occasionally interesting craftsmen, like Byatt, Amis, Cheever and Updike (why exclude Barth here?); others are the big boomers whose verbiage vastly exceeds their grasp, like Rushdie and Naipaul, though the latter has sociological interest; some are just flat narraticians--take your pick. I haven't entirely made up my mind about Fowles, though his work always has a magpie variety and surprise, which is appropriate to an artist who calls himself a magpie. But he's a genuine artist of great integrity, like almost no one else on this list, and a master of a finely honed discrimination that puts him somewhere in the line of Henry James. The master of Lyme Regis may unfortunately not be giving us any more of the real thing, since he hasn't published a novel since 1986 and is now in his 73rd year. The current "Wormholes" is just a melange of essays and reviews with no literary pretensions. You didn't mention Don DeLillo, who certainly seems better to me that most on the list, especially better than the creator of "Rabbit" Angstrom. People read all sorts of things, novels in particular, for rest and recreation, for relief from the Alltagswelt, for diversion of stress or for simple information. I don't read that way, because I don't think I have the time to waste and I have a low tolerance for boredom. ======================================== Steven J. Willett University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus 2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome Hamamatsu City, Japan 432-8012 Phone: (53) 457-4514 Fax: (53) 457-4555 Japan email: steven@sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp US email: sjwillett@earthlink.net .