castle of illusion

Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from. I think Barthelme’s stories of the sixties were really very liberating as far as what one could do with a short story, and I know that my own short stories have been influenced by his. Also, like Hemingway, he’s a great simplifier or stripper away of verbal nonsense. After reading enough Barthelme, your own stories tend to become a little shorter and cleaner and more spasmodic. John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m saying. His last novel, Chimera, which is really a series of novellas, was essentially about the kind of marital breakup and re-synthesis that I have written about. Pynchon I do feel more alien to; I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.