…how just positively tickled Bret Easton Ellis must have felt when David Remnick got made Editor of The New Yorker…
In his Nobel Prize-acceptance address, the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky insisted that literature is something “more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization.” That is a heartening thought when one thinks of the works of Dostoyevski and Tolstoy in light of the Soviet regime, but the American version is a bit jarring. Mr. Brodsky has clearly not read the works of Bret Easton Ellis et al. The shining literary lights of the Reagan era are the tiny eminences behind Less Than Zero and A Cannibal in Manhattan. The young, proto-serious novelists aren’t killing the novel, says critic Terrence Rafferty, they’re staging a “hostile takeover.”
– “The New Inferiority,” David Remnick, GQ, May 1988
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