Letters to the Editor
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Who the fuck is Laura Miller?
And when did she learn to read so fast?
Another Salon hack attempting to make a career by being snarky and faux clever on the back of someone with real talent. Thanks, LM, but if I want to read a shitty review I'll read SZ or HH.
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Please Print More
I hope Salon publishes more articles on books and authors--excluding the political book of the week. The novel is not dead; if it matters to just one person then it lives.
I agree that sacred cows like Pynchon should be criticized when they start to falter. Laura Miller acknowledged the incredible contribution he made to American fiction. The same principle applies elsewhere: Bobby Bowden of Florida State is not immune to criticism when his teams start to lose to the Wake Forrests of the world, and when he gets his screw-up son a half million dollar buy out. He believes his contributions to Florida State football render him immune from critique.
Overall, I think the Pynchon-esqe, sprawling novel of dozens of people and ideas is about tapped out. I can appreciate Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, but enough is enough. It is time for literature of the 21st century, whatever that may be.
Also tapped out: confessional literature/non-fiction. Augusten Burroughs and Frank McCourt(bad childhoods!), Franzen again and Donald Antrim (dead mothers!)Even Dave Eggers--enough.
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Bravo!
I'm surprised you didn't work an equation into your piece yourself, seeing as how trendy they are.
Still, well played. I wish I moved in circles where one could get paid for writing book reviews.
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I would feel the same way, if . . .
It is very likely that I would reach the same conclusion as Laura Miller concerning Against the Day if, like she, I were to skim throught the 1,000 plus pages instead of actually reading the book. Pynchon novels have never been easy to read quickly; his books must be read slowly and thoughtfully. I could be wrong about Miller's approach. Perhaps Salon has attained such a level of prestige that the elusive Pynchon has given them an exclusive preview months before the hundreds of other publications. None of this matters though. Every true fan of Pynchon's work doesn't give a flying fuck how it is received. This does not mean he should be above criticism, it just means that the Pynchon reader will be too absorbed in his work to bring their head out of the sand. This is one occasion when I don't mind being an ostrich.
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hmmm
I want to thank Laura Miller for her review. It brought me back to the time my friend and I read the same miserable paperback of V. on the night train to Prague. I tore off each chapter as I finished it and handed it to my friend to read.
Somehow that was the perfect book for the perfect moment and it all came together, the train, the customs officials with big guns and nervous faces, and the act of reading as destruction. I was so naive that I thought I'd really discovered something. The smartness made me feel like an insider, I felt like an initiate.
Gravity's Rainbow held me similarly spellbound with its equations and incredible length. (There's a book sure to start a conversation with the "right" person when plunked down on a table!)
I don't know whether it was Pynchon or I who petered out at the end of Mason & Dixon, but it was the end of an affair. I made it through and was glad I had done so but really, so long, it was great and all, but don't call me, I'll call you.
I am sad that this new book sounds like it didn't succeed, but I can't say it was unexpected. He always teetered on the edge of verbosity and obtuseness, but the trick was he pulled it off, albeit to lesser and lesser degrees.
I would love to see someone as bright and brilliant as Pynchon do something wonderful again, something concise (if that isn't too outrageous to ask) and clear that focuses his talent into one bright point. I look forward to reading that book, you know, the one the shadow Pynchon is working on as we speak.
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Surely you Jest
While I haven't read Pynchon's book yet (being shipped to me as we speak) I can't take seriously the contention that Infinite Jest surpassed it. To me, Infinite Jest was a schizophrenic combination of the worst cartoonish excesses of Pynchon (without bothering to do the fact checking) and some geuninely harrowing stories that felt stolen wholesale from people's actual experiences. In no way did it cohere as a novel (what WAS that ending about) so if there are Pynchon disciplines that write better than he, I have yet to see them.
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Judicious Review
Miller's review sounds like a fair assessment of the author's body of work up to Mason & Dixon which is about where I too left off reading Pynchon [began losing interest in Vineland]; be great if he found a brand new well [of inspiration], this vein feels tapped out, formulaic. An innovator, Pynchon extended the canon of American lit with Gravity's Rainbow and V. Who knows, maybe he'll step off in a completely unexpected direction next time, and dazzle us anew.
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In defense of Pynchonian paranoia
I'm a fan of Laura Miller's reviewing, and, ironically, I'm especially grateful to have been introduced to many of Pynchon's literary heirs through her reviews. Since I haven't read "Against the Day" yet (it hits shelves tomorrow), I can't speak to her negative assessment of its place in the Pynchon line-up. But since her reading of Pynchon's concept of paranoia clearly colors her view of this novel, I have to raise an objection.
To suggest that Pynchon's novels posit some ideal state of readership -- a perfectly paranoid reader "who's capable of grasping the 'secret' knowledge of how the world really works" -- is to miss the novels' nearly overwhelming emphasis on undecidability. The reader's growing sense of this undecidability is (or can be) a kind of a collaboration with the novels' exploration of systems of power, rather than an averse reaction to a "smarty-pants style of fiction."
While the novels critique the machinations of power and offer us protagonists who doggedly strip away at the layers, their sense of despair comes the ultimate futility of that action -- there's always another layer. And far from offering up these characters as paragons of striving, Pynchon's novels make a careful study of the corrosive effects of this single-mindedness -- witness Slothrop's disintegration in "Gravity's Rainbow," Oedipa's breakdown in "Lot 49" or, in an unusually pithy move for Pynchon, Benny Profane's moderation of Stencil's obsessiveness in "V," which produces the axiom, "Be cool, but care."
For me as a reader, the quest to find a writer of Pynchon's powers has been a lot like the always-just-out-of-reach "truth" of his novels -- I may never get there, but the ride has been spectacular. Miller is right that Pynchon's successors are many, various, and hugely talented. They deserve a big readership that sees beyond blithe assertions about the "type" of novel that would dare to question what a novel can be.