time, inexorable

I want to re-print on my blog excerpts from an article about Gore Vidal which appeared in the National Post, a paper with which I was unfamiliar.  Between the words National and Post is a cloverleaf, so think is Canadian.

The author of the piece is Philip Marchand.

Before I put in the excerpts, I have to say the repeated use of the word "cohort" was jarring to me because I only ever thought the word "cohort" would mean -- one of your comrades, or team-mates, or something.  Like -- "this gentleman and his cohorts"...having maybe an implication of "partners in crime" though perhaps not literal crime...just an expression.

But Mr. Marchand uses "cohort" to mean like a group of people -- the group, not the individual, is the "cohort."  I actually thought he was using it wrong -- but went to online Dictionary, and learned that "cohort" can mean the whole group.  That was new to me.  Maybe Canadians use it that way more often than we do in the "lower 48."

Now, am caught up, & wanted to mention in case anyone would read it here and be confused, as I was.

excerpts, Philip Marchand's article entitled, "Gore Vidal:  Last of his Kind"----------------It was not because he was a gifted essayist and novelist and not because he was a master of the cool medium of television — “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television,” he once confessed — and not because he was an outrageous character with outrageous opinions that the heart saddened at the news of Gore Vidal’s passing.


He was the last of a cohort of writers — Norman Mailer, William Styron, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut — who wore the uniform of the U.S. military or served in the merchant marine during the Second World War. (Malamud was the sole exception, but he, too, was formed by the atmosphere of that conflict.) For some of these writers — Heller {author, Catch-22}, Vonnegut, Mailer — their wartime experience figured directly in their fiction. For others, such as Vidal, the experience touched them relatively lightly, but still reinforced something profound about their love/hate relationship with the American Republic.

What cannot be denied is that the work of these Second World War veterans resulted in the most creative period in American literary history. …

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Boomer novelists certainly have never escaped the shadow of this cohort. One reason for this is that members of the cohort were also the last generation of writers to grow up wholly innocent of television. We will never know how this affected their work, but it did make their minds work differently than the generation that grew up afterward.

In Vidal’s case, TV celebrity though he was, the medium sharpened his awareness of television’s threat to prose fiction.

Mailer recalls Vidal lamenting, in 1963, “with a certain bitter joy,” the decline of the novel. Of course, writers in all periods like to complain, “with a certain bitter joy,” of the decay of literature. Novels do continue to be written despite this. But for Vidal, the flowering of the American novel occurred in a very brief period. “No one has yet captured the sense of excitement of the literary scene in the Forties,” he wrote in a 1968 essay. “Between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, it looked as if we were going to have a most marvellous time in all the arts; and the novel was very much alive.”

That time passed. “It may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age which Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed post-Gutenberg,” Vidal wrote in a 1967 essay. “Novel reading is not a pastime of the young now being educated, nor, for that matter, is it a preoccupation of any but a very few of those who came of age in the last warm years of linear type’s hegemony.” His conclusion: “Our lovely, vulgar and most human art is at an end.”

That’s premature, of course, but cyberspace looks more and more like the place where novels, long since devastated by the end of “linear type’s hegemony,” go to die.
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...Most importantly, with this novel {Julian} Vidal seems to have come to terms with his satirical talents. As the critic Wyndham Lewis points out, satire is focused on the exteriors of people — any attempt to portray the mind of a character, the play of his or her thoughts, is death to satire….

--------------------- [end excerpt]
I thought his article was very good, though I don't know if that last part about satire is true or not.  I don't think it has to be all about the exteriors of people.  But maybe I have a different concept of satire than the author of the article.  (Maybe it's in a cohort.... : )

And about novels being a thing of the past -- every week in the New York Times brand new novels are reviewed...printed on paper...YES!  And someone just told me yesterday or the day before that she found Jana Deleon's "Mudbug" novels online & read one, and thoroughly enjoyed it, and she's one of the people who really doesn't "have time" to read -- working, raising family, etc.

There's Trouble in Mudbug, Mischief in Mudbug, and Showdown in Mudbug.

Mailer, Malamud, Marchand -- meet Mudbug.

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