Pynchon Pynchon Pynchon
BOOKFORUM | Summer 2005
Lengthy but well-written appreciation of Gravity's Rainbow - this contains the stunning facts that both V and Lot 49 sold over 3 million paperback copies in the U.S. in the 60s. Those are big sales for a (then) fairly unknown and certainly not mass-market author.
I have only read Gravity's Rainbow once, although I've read the rest of the Pynchon collection at least twice, and V about four times.
It was Avi Chatterjee who first suggest Lot 49, pointing out that not only could I read it in a single sitting, bt I should, so that the book's mounting sense of paranoia wasn't released halfway through. He was exactly right. From there it was a short step to V, and then onto Gravity's Rainbow.
I have to admit that I struggled with it, until I borrowed a guide from the library that explained all the references and summarised each chapter. This may be cheating, but I was otherwise stumped.
So now I need to reread it. It's obvious that Pynchon is my favourite author, although that's not really much of a tag from me since I tend not to follow any one author (I couldn't name the author of half the books I read.) V is great, Lot 49 a great long short story (as Pynchon himself called it). Vineland was a disappointment - it takes a very long time to get going, although it does turn goo in the end. Mason and Dixon likewise starts with a lot of false notes, but I think that time will judge it to be his second-best book after Gravity's Rainbow (although V will always be my favourite, I recognise that it is a first novel, with all the enthusiastic mistakes we associate with them).
There is a sense in which Pynchon does appeal more to the young - his themes of conspiracy, paranoia and the ugly nature of government and big corporations will always be popular with those who doe not have mortgages. This is why Mason and Dixon is such a big book for him - after the failure of Vineland (a book about formers 60s radicals struggling to cope with the 80s, it gave the impression of an author popualr with 60s radicals struggling to cope with the 80s) it showed that he could write mature, profound novels. The main theme of M&D is, to me, loss and at least partial reconcilliation. It moved me a lot more when I reread it in my 30s than when I first read it in my 20s.
Pynchon is also, for an author who in three of his five novels chose to set them at least partially in the past, forward looking. The article linked to here pointed out that in GR he has characters talking about information as a tradeable commodity. But in Lot 49 he posits the idea of an alterantive to the government sanctioned postal system. Although he wasn't predicting it, he is in effect talking about email years before any form of Internet existed.
Lengthy but well-written appreciation of Gravity's Rainbow - this contains the stunning facts that both V and Lot 49 sold over 3 million paperback copies in the U.S. in the 60s. Those are big sales for a (then) fairly unknown and certainly not mass-market author.
I have only read Gravity's Rainbow once, although I've read the rest of the Pynchon collection at least twice, and V about four times.
It was Avi Chatterjee who first suggest Lot 49, pointing out that not only could I read it in a single sitting, bt I should, so that the book's mounting sense of paranoia wasn't released halfway through. He was exactly right. From there it was a short step to V, and then onto Gravity's Rainbow.
I have to admit that I struggled with it, until I borrowed a guide from the library that explained all the references and summarised each chapter. This may be cheating, but I was otherwise stumped.
So now I need to reread it. It's obvious that Pynchon is my favourite author, although that's not really much of a tag from me since I tend not to follow any one author (I couldn't name the author of half the books I read.) V is great, Lot 49 a great long short story (as Pynchon himself called it). Vineland was a disappointment - it takes a very long time to get going, although it does turn goo in the end. Mason and Dixon likewise starts with a lot of false notes, but I think that time will judge it to be his second-best book after Gravity's Rainbow (although V will always be my favourite, I recognise that it is a first novel, with all the enthusiastic mistakes we associate with them).
There is a sense in which Pynchon does appeal more to the young - his themes of conspiracy, paranoia and the ugly nature of government and big corporations will always be popular with those who doe not have mortgages. This is why Mason and Dixon is such a big book for him - after the failure of Vineland (a book about formers 60s radicals struggling to cope with the 80s, it gave the impression of an author popualr with 60s radicals struggling to cope with the 80s) it showed that he could write mature, profound novels. The main theme of M&D is, to me, loss and at least partial reconcilliation. It moved me a lot more when I reread it in my 30s than when I first read it in my 20s.
Pynchon is also, for an author who in three of his five novels chose to set them at least partially in the past, forward looking. The article linked to here pointed out that in GR he has characters talking about information as a tradeable commodity. But in Lot 49 he posits the idea of an alterantive to the government sanctioned postal system. Although he wasn't predicting it, he is in effect talking about email years before any form of Internet existed.
posted by Toby Scott at 7/27/2005 01:54:00 PM
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