Filed under: book, postmodernism | Tags: ellroy, gravity's rainbow, paranoia, postmodernism, pynchon, rockets
Today while reading a collection of James Ellroy short pieces (a bunch of crime articles for GQ and a few novellas) entitled Destination: Morgue!, I started to think about how obsessive great artists tend to be. Ellroy, for example, is obsessed with boxing and the murder of his mother, echoing certain obsessions that Raymond Chandler had. Essentially, the reason that they write about obsession so well is that the act of writing is the channeling of that obsession, not the release from it, but the distillation of it. Simply put, they obsess through their writing, and the obsessions of the characters become that much more real for it.
Now, Thomas Pynchon is an altogether different beast. I have been attempting to read Gravity’s Rainbow, but I am finding it so dense and evocative that I can only manage to bust my way through ten pages at a time. When describing a desk, he describes each thing on that desk with the precision and thought generally reserved for a short story writer charged with writing a story-long description of the desk. (more…)
