THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

Harold Bloom is still fuming over the National Book Foundation's decision to bestow an award on horrormeister Stephen King for his "distinguished contribution" to letters. By that measure, Bloom harrumphs, J.K. Rowling ought to get the Nobel Prize. As far as he's concerned, "there are four living American novelists" -- and only four -- "who are still at work and who deserve our praise."

The lucky fellows are Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. (I suppose Saul Bellow isn't working any more, not that I'm such a fan.) To dispute the distinguised professor would be foolish, given his academic credentials and his way with women. But if DeLillo makes his list, I have to wonder whether Bloom's judgment hasn't cracked in his old age. And let's face it, if you want to intimidate someone, just say "Gravity's Rainbow." That is the Pynchon novel. Has anybody besides Bloom finished it?

Meantime, isn't he taking the National Book Foundation more seriously than it deserves? Nelson Algren, who won the first National Book Award for "The Man With the Golden Arm," once told me he tried to hock the medal it came with and couldn't get five bucks for it.

September 23, 2003 4:33 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on September 23, 2003 4:33 AM.

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