As to these laboriously long novels that keep being churned out--Mason & Dixon, Europe Central, Letters, Women & Men, Infinite Jest--etc., etc., one isn't saying they are worthless, but one does need to point out they are symptomatic of the out of control work ethic of capitalism, which is responsible for a vast amount of harm across the globe, substituting endless compulsive unexamined busy-ness for reflective thinking. N.O. Ting: "And let's not let Moby Dick off the hook either. Go ahead, arrest me, I could give a f*ck."
I mean look at Hamlet. No longer than a couple chapters in one of these doorstops, readable in next to no time, comparatively, and it stays in one's thoughts for a lifetime. Why can't people see this? What's wrong with something like Moody's Hotels of North America or Bukowski's Factotum or Chambers' Delta 88 or Robbe-Grillet's Djinn? Are these literary crimes because they do not weight eight lbs. each? Because they are pure pleasure and do not make one feel like Sisyphus? Because they are as graceful and light as a ballet dancer sailing through the air?
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