Letters to the Editor
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The Fall of the House of Laura Miller
Having read ATD, it seems to me - as it has with many of the other reviews - that (understandably, given the book's bulk) Miss Miller has skimmed the pages in search of incidentals to back up her hypothesis, formed clearly before she had the book in hand, that Pynchon is "bad," that his "disciples" can "out-Pynchon" him. Reviewers with agendas are all too frequent - who knows, maybe that's what a review needs these days, something to make them stick out of the pack? - but Miss Miller's recent work is all to full of undercooked pedantry... remember her assessment of Stephen Wright, and her subsequent self-aggrandizing swoon over his most recent book, a far less readable and enjoyable endeavor than this one? It is a pity, because regardless of whether or not Pynchon is still "cool," he deserves more than a few literarily cursory glances. I wish reviewers like Miss Miller could quote parts of the book that actually sing, that each review of the Pynchon book contained something new and illuminating previous reviews hadn't, because, to be frank, it seems that the verdict of this review, as so many others, was decided before it was dashed off, haphazardly, to meet a deadline. It is, to be blunt, a real fucking shame.
But such, I guess, is the state of our literature today, that a great book can still be published and dismissed, rather than discussed, as it deserves....
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Laura's Tell
In poker, a tell is any habit, behavior, or physical reaction, that gives other players more information about your hand.
Laura Miller's review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel contains two such tells:
The first: her lionization of a writer like David Foster Wallace, who can give us a novel every bit as antic and intellectually demanding as "Against the Day," and can also populate it with believable people whose fates not only interest but break our hearts. Sorry, Laura, but the only things heart-breaking about Foster's writing is how boring it is, and how smug he is, and intellectually he's a joke.
The second tell: Laura's catty the good guys in "Against the Day" are anarchists, just about the only revolutionary persuasion compatible with Pynchon's notion of virtuous political behavior.
You would prefer maybe Rahm Emmanual, or is Barack Obama more YOUR kind of politician, Laura? Is it the bohemianism that bothers you, or do you just think they should be engaged in more meaningful tasks - like reviewing books?
I plan to buy the book; I plan to read the book. I'm fairly confident I will find far more nutritious fare in it than Laura did - if I'm wrong and she's right, I'll apologize.
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Entropy
The funny thing about Pynchon's novels, it seems to me, is the way in which they have enacted together one of his favorite structuring metaphors: entropy. His first novel, V, was comparatively pithy at about 500 pp., as hindsight would prove; but it was with his second, The Crying of Lot 49, that he achieved his masterpiece, in my opinion. The novel is so tight, so dense, so lyrical and explosively metaphorical -- and so brief (a mere 183 pp.) -- that it is, in Pynchon's oeuvre, practically a prose poem. Phoebelou writes that she is waiting for him to do something concise, but she doesn't mention Lot 49, where he has done it, and magnificently. Ever since, the entropy has increased as his novels have unravelled before our eyes. The compactness and volatility of the metaphors in Lot 49 (to name just a few of the rich, astonishingly meaningful -- in the literal sense -- puns on the nature of language, belief, and communication: isolation, clarity, buffering and stripping, unfurrowing, and, the most important, revelation and its punning relation to apocalypse, miracle and hierophany) achieve the impossible: not only do they pinwheel through various meanings and connotations of the words themselves, but they function on the level of plot to fight the story's central enemy of entropy--as loss, disintegration, a failure to communicate, and death.
After Lot 49, the books just got bigger, looser, more unconnected, more disintegrating. (Would Pynchon respond a la Gloria Swanson that it was the readers that got small? Maybe.) I still think that Pynchon at his baggiest out-writes the vast majority of America's living writers, including some of the most celebrated: I'll read him over De Lillo any day of the week. Miller's review perfectly accords with my feeling about Mason & Dixon, so I'm betting I'll agree with her on Against the Day, too -- but I'm still going to devour every word. And anyone who wants to see Pynchon accept all of the challenges Miller throws at him in this piece should read Lot 49 -- word for word. (Then read Acts II, if you're not up on your Pentecost.) There you will encounter real characters (well, ok, one real character, despite her obligatory silly-symbolic name), real emotions, an antic surface dancing on the grave of a profound grief, and dazzling ideas. Not to mention a beautiful riff on the famous end of The Great Gatsby at the (stealth) denouement, thrown in as a bonus.
I would fight hard for it as one of the five greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Maybe top three, when I'm fresh from re-reading it and want to cry at the sad gorgeousness of the language. The novel's showy puerile humor is a laughing-mask and a shell game: the first word Oedipa speaks is God -- indirectly rendered, in a perfectly judged decision -- and in the novel's final sentence she awaits a revelation, which might be the Holy Ghost delivering the gift of language and communication, and it might be apocalypse (which means revelation). The silly jokes are part whistling in the dark, and they are part evidence of Pynchon's belief, clearly stated at the novel's climax, that "there is a high magic to low puns."
Sarah Churchwell
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Someone asked: Who the fuck is Laura Miller?
From Who is Salon?
Laura Miller, Senior Editor, wrote a letter one day to a magazine edited by David Talbot in response to an article written by Gary Kamiya, and the next thing she knew she was working with both of them on the most exciting Web site around. Actually, in between those momentous events, she kept busy — writing about movies, books, theater, digital culture and social issues for newspapers and national magazines, including the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, Harper's Bazaar and Wired; and spending a lot of time online. One day she hopes to be sitting on a balcony overlooking a canal in Venice, Italy, reading the entire works of Henry James, but this'll do for now.
Why, how precious!