paul beatty.

xpost there—hanh, i deleted mention of the lethem book as my example

that's a really unparseable sentence. there was a bit in that post where i talked about lethem's two most recent, as examples of 'works' and 'doesn't work'; then i deleted it.

he has named his book after an indie rock label

also after a furniture manufacture company

and a blog and/or villa rental agency

guys i think it may not be too much of a stretch to assume a book set in berlin called 'slumberland' and featuring a bar called 'slumberland' is actually named for <a href=;the actual bar 'slumberland' in berlin</a>

i may be wrong though, maybe it is slumberland, home of 'crystal stilts', 'bricolage', and 'sexy kids'

THE SELLOUT. Satire. Outrageous. Challenging. Wit. Talent.

At times it curiously reminded me of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE with its sense of place, urban community.

The one thing I'm more dubious about is the regular recourse to the Pynchonian wacky set-piece where lots of people simultaneously do daft things while making supposed wisecracks. Reading this novel has made me reflect that this thing I don't like about Pynchon is perhaps not as specifically Pynchonian as I tend to think.

Come to think of it, some of Dos Passos's USA Trilogy has pre-Pynchonian elements: the business men, the arts-media-military-merchant-marine partiers---at home and abroad, before-during-after-the-War (Great War in this case) the civilian government workers, radicals, homeless, even more randos---also capsule lives of the great, which can steal the stage from his fictional characters---the author can seem like a higher-energy P., getting maybe that cynical toward the end, but no hipster-Calvinist agenda for D P, thank Frank (although he did become very right wing later).
In between the younger JDP and TP, Invisible Man ( all set in the[maybe late 20s and?]30s, I think, but published in early 50s) does the antic thing better, in part because not over and over and over, like these other two, but they'd prob say repetition is a big part of the way of living they are depicting.
xxpost re music scenes in novels, the descriptions of immersive jazz experiences--certainly for the narrator; although the musicians are bearing down, they're also pros, no doubt making their real money, such as it isl on the road, same as it ever was for most---so, though they might regard a stunning experience for eyewitness and his reader as yeah, a pretty good night, for them it is also, like, Tuesday--er, I'm referring to the descriptions of gigs in On The Road. I'll never think of Slim Galliard the same way again. (Think at least some of these were published as "Jazz and the Beat Generation," before the novel.)
Also the musical experiences in In Search of Lost Time.

Must admit I haven't read U.S.A., but sounds like it must be quite different from the earlier MANHATTAN TRANSFER which is not zanily Pynchonesque at all.

USA isn't zany in the slightest but it is Pynchonian in the way it scatters its characters across the world and leaves them at the mercy of historical forces. Obviously the Pynchon novels that go hardest on this (especially Against The Day) are more likely to be channeling Dos Passos than the other way round.

FWIW I don't find The Sellout Pynchonian either but they both share a love for a sort of screwball comedy caper that precedes both of them.