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“I guess that’s what all writers aspire to, being a genre unto themselves. Like Elmore Leonard—he wrote westerns, thrillers, just about everything. Readers would seek out his writing for an Elmore Leonard experience. Maybe that’s what’s happening—like Leonard, I’m becoming a brand.”
Evolving as brand name “Gibson” in the grey zone in between genre writing and literary fiction seems liberating. Freed from the stylistic strictures of both genres ensures a wide swathe for Gibson’s stylistic quirkiness.

Whereas there are plenty of tamer writers who claim Joycean influences, Gibson (who has not) seems sometimes as if his project is actually to update modernist literary strategies for a 21st-century audience. Sometimes phrases just grate in the ear. The reader finds herself frantically paging backwards to reread. Chapters begin with ambiguous pronoun references. The joy of reading starts to resemble the Protestant work ethic.

Like the best of modernists, Gibson defends his sometimes challenging style. “I’m not just doing it to be difficult. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that there was something to be gained from it.”

Believing that the essence of any book resides not in the realm of authorial intention, but squarely in the reader’s own mind, Gibson says that he always ensures a path for the committed reader to appreciate his writing.
“I just think that somehow it makes for a better experience.” One that is certainly unique to Gibson’s writing.

quote:

Whereas there are plenty of tamer writers who claim Joycean influences, Gibson (who has not) seems sometimes as if his project is actually to update modernist literary strategies for a 21st-century audience. Sometimes phrases just grate in the ear. The reader finds herself frantically paging backwards to reread. Chapters begin with ambiguous pronoun references. The joy of reading starts to resemble the Protestant work ethic.

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I think it was something like, WG only writes about things that interest him personally, for his own weird reasons

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I think WG tries hard to appeal, in that he works hard to make a novel such that the reader will want to read it.