Philip K. Dick, have I got a story for you!
Anyone who’s ever taken the hint and cracked one of the books also knows he’s many kinds of problematic–foremost in the disastrous unevenness of his prose, even within the space of a given page. He’s that species of great writer, the uneven-prose species: Dickens, Dreiser and Highsmith are others. Russians will tell you Dostoevsky is too, and that we don’t know this because translators have been covering his ass. Dick’s ass, though, is uncoverable. His sentences routinely fall down and cry “ouch”. In the words of Bob Dylan, another prolific and variable artist whose oeuvre offers pitfalls for newcomers, “I’m in love with the ugliest girl in the world!”
from the essay “You Don’t Know Dick”, Jonathan Lethem
unreliable narrator said,
April 13, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Perfect.
jskah said,
April 13, 2009 at 4:54 pm
nod to dostoevsky (this is why i am like PSYCHOTIC about pevear & volokhonsky) but also OH GOD THIS! just wrote similarly on yr goodreads, but: the book that made me hate lethem. just now i literally read this paragraph wincing, my face slightly turned from the screen, peripheral reading – like okay! ready to duck & run! – but in these lines (at least) he didn’t rear the head of supreme fuckheadedness; let me know if/when you see it yrself & in the meantime we’ll hope it was all a bad dream, shared in by everyone i know, reading his intros to books (fox! dick! he knows their souls in a way you never will!) & his articles & anything in which he left space for nonfiction.
basically lethem: prose yrself out of the picture, plz.