All Intensive Purposes

Pynchon speaks (again!):

Thomas Pynchon, who vies with J D Salinger for the title of the world's most secretive author, has broken his strict rules on privacy to join a campaign to clear the British Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan of charges of plagiarism.

. . . Pynchon . . . sent a typed letter to his British agent yesterday to say that McEwan "merits not our scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's book. . . .

McEwan has been under fire for copying several details from the memoirs of a wartime nurse in London for his Booker-nominated novel, Atonement.

In an extraordinary campaign launched yesterday, many of the world's best known authors rallied around McEwan, complaining that the future of historical novel-writing was threatened if they could not copy or borrow details from eyewitnesses to history.

Other novelists backing the author include John Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally and Zadie Smith.

Courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, here's the letter (click on it to enlarge):