the freak flag is in tatters

The New York Sun pronounces the end (more or less) of the counterculture. [emphasis mine]:

The complexity of [Thomas Pynchon's] novels, and of this eagerly awaited sixth novel in particular, is really a matter of simple multiplicity: They are stuffed to bursting with oddities, so that the reader moves through them at the halting pace of a rubbernecker. In “Against the Day,” which spans the quarter-century between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I, Mr. Pynchon dispenses his oddities in double fistfuls. We get a hot-air balloon crewed by boy adventurers, a dynamite-toting anarchist, a mysterious fourth dimension, a crystal lens that splits time, a ship that can sail through sand, the legendary Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala — and that doesn’t even begin to exhaust the list. …

If you are dazzled by the sheer number of odd items Mr. Pynchon accumulates here, by the range of his knowledge and curiosity, you will be still more dazzled by the unstoppable proliferation of the novel, which adds new characters, new plots, and new settings until the very last of its 1,100 pages. Mr. Pynchon writes as if his pleasure in trundling the hoop of the novel from place to place were unlimited, and as if the reader could not help but share it. …

“Against the Day,” then, will inevitably be read as Mr. Pynchon’s contribution to the genre of post-September 11 fiction. Yet by comparison with the other major novelists who have addressed this theme, he displays a surpassingly crude moral imagination. This is a novel, after all, in which most of the heroes are proud terrorists, committed on principle to murdering plutocrats like Scarsdale Vibe. Writing about such characters in our own age of terror, one might expect Mr. Pynchon to have given some thought to the rights and wrongs of political violence.

In fact, however, his attitude towards violence is childishly sentimental, and ruthless in a way only possible to a writer whose imagination has never dwelt among actual human beings. Mr. Pynchon’s heroes (the poor, the workers, Anarchists) assassinate and blow up his villains (mine owners, Pinkerton thugs, the bourgeoisie) with no more qualms than the Road Runner has about dropping an anvil on the Coyote. In the novel as in the cartoon, good and evil are unproblematic, death is unreal, and sheer activity takes the place of human motive. The silliness of “Against the Day” about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need.

Unfortunately, the National Book Award went to an obscure novelist last night (or, at least, one whose work I don’t know—which is another way of saying “obscure”), even if it does seem to address the subjects we need to understand. (There’s nothing wrong with obscurity except the fact that it obscures your message…until [or if] you become less obscure. That ain’t gonna happen here. Count on it.)

Here’s my lament: Where are the novelists, filmmakers, dramatists, and artists we need?

And, no, I don’t mean Botero, whose new work you can read all about at Counterpunch.