GC’s Monday Quiz,
via David Gates’ review of The Outlaw Bible for the NYTBR:
Who exactly qualifies as an outlaw and why? Let’s try a little quiz. Without looking at the table of contents, which two made the grade?A) Bret Easton Ellis
B) Norman Mailer
C) Grace Paley
D) Raymond Carver
Time’s up: B and C. Mailer qualifies because he’s ”walked a tightrope over public opinion, often with a dagger in his teeth” — possibly an allusion to his stabbing his wife all those years ago? — for his ”hipster manifesto ‘The White Negro’ ” and his ”literary sponsorship of the criminal Jack Henry Abbott” (who’s also in the anthology). Paley has published ”highly acclaimed collections of short fiction,” but heck, so has Munro. Selling point: her antiwar, antinuke and feminist activism. So what’s wrong with Ellis and Carver? If you read carefully the stuff I quoted above — I can’t blame you if you skimmed — you’ll see why they don’t belong in the club of those who don’t belong in the Club. Patrick Bateman in Ellis’s ”American Psycho” is far more crazed and violent than Stephen Rojack in Mailer’s ”American Dream,” but he’s an I.P.O. kind of guy: out. Carver passes the trailer-park test, but his flintlike precisionism doesn’t fit the lava-flow aesthetic. Outlaws are not anal.
(Gates’ review, btw, is notable not only for its multiple-choice ardor, but its fearlessly facile critique of Alice Munro: “… Goon squads of editors and critics … keep the frightened masses buying superficially quiet fiction about superficially quiet people by Alice Munro …” As facile as it is, I’m endeared by its originality; I’d rather hear a new opinion I disgaree with than an obvious opinion well-put.)
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