From: Jezzaroona
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 9/4/99
Time: 5:12:41 AM
Remote Name: 195.44.204.97
Eh oh!
This idea of some fool comparing Hornby to MA is laughable. Hornby's writing make's me think of the word "cunt". I've posted this before - but I picked up *Alma Cogan* by brit writer Gordon Burn, and it had an MA comparison on the blurb on the back cover, usually a bad sign, but in this case was spot on! Don't be too quick to slag off the state of brit. lit. until you've read Gordon Burn (and Tibor Fischer and Michael Bracewell and Patricia Dunker and Rachel Cusk ...)
Talking of Rachel Cusk, I've been reading *The Temporary*...pretty damn good - reminiscent of Pynchon and Amis - and she can write about "chicks" in a way that these two might not be able to. Will report back with more info. (her 1st novel, *Saving Agnes* won the Whitbread Prize as did *Alma Cogan* so I'll try and read that too).
Pynchon. The guy's middle name was Ruggles. It doesn't get better than that, except perhaps his overuse, stretching their limitiations towards breaking points, like heated plastic being pulled into strands with thicknesses ever-approaching the monocellular, of commas. Also I do understand the frustrations of some with his "heavier" (physically!) books. Can't believe I managed to read (the incredibly dry) *V* in my lunch hours when I was a hospital temp - a penance for never having read *Bleak House* or *Middlemarch*?
Pynchon sez (Eat you heart out David Hasslehoff):
"Rex had once owned a Porsche 911, as red as a cherry in a cocktail, his favourite toy creature, his best disguise, his personal confidant, and more, in fact all that a car could be for a man, and its fair to say Rex had made a tidy emotional as well as cash investment - indeed, he would not have flinched from the word "relationship". He called it Bruno. He knew the location of every all-night car-wash in the four counties, he'd fallen asleep on his back beneath its ventral coolness, with a plastic tool case for a pillow, and slept right through the night, and he had even, more than once, in scented petroleum dimness, had his throbbing manhood down inside one flared chrome carburetor barrel as the engine idled and with sensitive care he adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm, as man and machine together rose to peaks of hitherto unimaginable ecstasy..."