The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Fall 2001: Gilbert Sorrentino/William Gaddis/Mary Caponegro/Margery Latimer by John O'Brien

The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Fall 2001: Gilbert Sorrentino/William Gaddis/Mary Caponegro/Margery Latimer Reviews

• 
  Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

  Sorrentino -- Not enough has been written on Sorrentino. Not enough readers read him. I don’t read him enough.
  
  William Gaddis -- As if I’ve not read enough yet about Gaddis. Yet each piece I read tends toward a rewarding revisit. I have two book=length Gaddis studies still unread on my shelf.
  
  
  Mary Caponegro -- I recently fell in love with her. Wish she had written more.
  
  
  Margery Latimer -- And because the feminist project of recovering lost female writers was so central to the inspiration of the BURIED Book Club, let me quote Joy Castro’s final three paragraphs in full ::
  
  “The results of the feminist project of recovering lost or historically undervalued women writers are now so successful as to have become commonplace: ‘When I grow up,’ a little girl tells her companion in a recent New Yorker cartoon, ‘I want to be rediscovered.’ As a theoretical exercise, scholar Mary Poovey recently recovered the work of nineteenth-century British novelist Ellen Pickering--not for its own sake, but in order to test the contemporary critical practices and assumptions that inform such projects. Citing the arbitrarily selected novelist’s conventionality, Poovey concluded in the Yale Journal of Criticism, ‘Do I think that Pickering’s works should be canonized? No, frankly, I don’t.’
  “In contrast, Latimer’s work urges our serious examination on its own merit. Critics encountering her fiction in recent years have called repeatedly for recuperation. Former MLA president Louis Kampf closes his 1984 essay on Latimer with the assertion that she ‘richly deserves a place of honor in the history of American modernism’, and Daniel McCarthy argues that ‘a closer look at her is overdue’. [Jean] Toomer’s biographers Kerman and Eldridge assert that her ‘phenomenal career’ deserves critical consideration, and a recent study of [Kenneth] Fearing calls Latimer ‘immaculate, luminous, mystical, otherworldly,’ an ‘exceptionally gifted young writer'. At the college level, her work teaches well in conjunction with that of her American contemporaries Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway; students find Latimer equally challenging, stimulating, and revealing. Erudite and experimental, her work participates equally in the modernist project yet offers a feminist perspective on issues of sexuality, social structure, urbanization, and technology.
  “Do I think that Latimer’s works should be canonized? Yes, frankly, I do. Appreciating Latimer’s groundbreaking contributions to literature complicates and enhances our understanding of both modernist and American literary canons, and recognizing her reinterpretations of material by her female predecessors unearths intertextual links within women’s literary traditions. Like the important female modernists whose work has been excavated in recent decades and like the rediscovered American women writers Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Zora Neale Hurston, Margery Latimer was lost for too long. It is time to find her.” [Castro’s essay is available here (pdf)::
  http://joycastro.com/Latimer%20articl... --thanks to Friend Jonathan for the link]
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  Gilbert Sorrentino, for those inclined to ignore my random gushings, was the greatest and most prodigious American writer of formally innovative comedic fiction. His body of work towers over the experimental scene (if such a scene exists) as a reminder of how to write daring and outstanding novels of ludicrous artistry, humour and compassion. The piece from David Andrews in here explores his techniques and the creative daisychaining of his books, among them the outstanding
  Pack of Lies trilogy. William Gaddis wrote lumbering satirical epics delineating the American dream. His prose was denser, tougher and more Joycean than Sorrentino but his twin-tower novels
  The Recognitions and
  JR are held in high esteem in the annals of academe. Mary Caponegro is a fabulist short story writer and the essay in here explores her work’s religious and sexual themes, and provides a primer for her works, among them
  The Star Café. Margery Latimer was an overlooked leftist feminist writer, dead at 33, who left behind four progressive books of daring and important writing about tortured female characters. Her work is overdue a revival, with
  Guardian Angel and Other Stories the only one in print.