"His fiction’s chief flaws include characters so flimsy they are dead on arrival, superficial plots, a tin ear for dialogue and an adolescent awe of spectacular violence. These are merely the charges that Pynchon cheerfully levies against himself, in the introduction to 'Slow Learner' (1984).... To them I would add: an unfortunate habit of delivering exposition through dialogue ('Let me guess, you’re wondering why are we sending you eight hundred miles out of town'); pacing so robotic it feels lifted from 1950s comic books; an almost compulsive busyness that feels like a kind of horror vacui, a fear of the empty page; flat jokes; wooden romances; ridiculous attempts at menace ('It’s OK, I’m a creature of the streets, all gatted up, don’t trust nobody'); and an uncomfortable fixation on Shirley Temple. Can I confess that this list was compiled with affection, even admiration?"
Writes Parul Sehgal, in "Thomas Pynchon Saw Where America Was Headed. What Does He See Now?/The novelist anticipated our bizarre present. How does his latest book hold up in an age of eroding reality?" (NYT)(reviewing Pynchon's new novel "Shadow Ticket).
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29 comments:
There are parts of some of his early books--Gravity's Rainbow in particular--that have stuck with me, but I've skipped his books since then.
Maybe I'll give this one a try.
If it is getting review(advertising) space from the NYTs I can already guess what the book is about.
The Twilight Fringe is a liberal litany in progress, but there are mitigating factors and choices that reserve a viable future.
Per Wikipedia - "Set in 1932, McTaggart becomes entangled in Mafia politics, Nazi sympathizers in Chicago's German-American community, and FBI schemes to sabotage Roosevelt and suppress left-wing politics."
Nazis and the FBI. Again. Oy vey. But what did I expect? The man was born in 1937. Rarely do veteran novelists strike out in a new direction after 60. Normally its just rinse and repeat.
That's why less talented writers who've created "a Character" like Philip Marlowe or Nero Wolfe age better. They just write the same sort of story over and over.
Pynchon to me is emblematic of the baby boomers — and that is who reads him, mainly. The entire conceit of his hiding his image is a brilliant marketing ploy that the press is complicit in (Pynchon is actually well known to many and seen everyday doing the routine tasks of life around town). His writing reflects a detachment of emotions, which defines that generation, who conceal it behind pseudo intellectualism. I suspect in 25 years Pynchon will largely be forgotten because at that end what survives is good story telling, which he never mastered. One might hope at this point he learned the basics of story-telling, but that would mean self-awareness, which is in short supply.
These are merely the charges that Pynchon cheerfully levies against himself, in the introduction to 'Slow Learner' (1984).
“It’s a piece of shit.”
https://getyarn.io/yarn-story/6123f601-0c63-47bd-aab4-51716bfe50be
I enjoyed "Death of A black haired girl" by Robert Stone. He wrote it when he was 70 or so. But even then you can see him writing about the same sort of things he'd done before. And its shorter and writing has less zip than the previous novels.
I suspect in 25 years Pynchon will largely be forgotten.
I think he's mostly forgotten now. His most acclaimed novel was "Gravitys Rainbow" and the Pulitizer Prize advisory board described it as: "'unreadable', 'turgid', 'overwritten', and in parts 'obscene'".
But that's the fate of most artists. How many people under 60 read Mailer or Vidal anymore?
"The entire conceit of his hiding his image..."
The suggestion that a man would need to hide is problematic....
I don’t mean to be too critical of an author commanding such a large readership with books that demand such a large amount of reading, but parody is best done by those who have mastered the form. Pynchon never mastered the basic elements of novel story-telling so his oh-so-knowing subversion of the form has strong whiff of falsity about it. He mocks literature that takes itself too seriously, but doesn't really come over as superior, because it doesn't appear as if he actually has anything to say.
Meanwhile there were actual soviet in the atate department
He lost me in the early pages of "Gravity's Rainbow," there was no point to it. "The English Patient" had the same soporific effect. I'll stick to genre literature, thank you.
Gravitys rainbow had some interesting elements likr thr herero incident the details of tbe rocket program
The english patient does get a while to get moving the interesting thing is why would oomdatje pick al masi a hungarian aristocrat as protagonist
"Can I confess that this list was compiled with affection, even admiration?"
After reading/making it through both The Crying of Lot 49 and Slow Learner, I would absolutely agree with the writer's assessment, but my conclusion is far from admiration and affection. I don't remember much of the story of the first except it featured a main character called Mucho Maas or something, it used the word "tendril" about fifty times in less than 200 pages, and it came across as the typical of the worst collective habits of 1960's American novelists. Barth at least had more interesting ideas, Updike had decent prose at least. Pynchon had neither, IMO. Slow Learner just seemed like Buck-A-Book level writing and without anything worth remembering.
Oedipas maas yes a little too clever by half
I had forgotten how ponderous rainbow was
I've only read "The Crying of Lot 49." I recall it being weird. Really weird. Imaginary postal service and grinding up GI bones weird. Almost William Burroughs weird.
If "Adaptation" was about the impossibility of making Susan Orlean's book into a movie, "One Battle After Another" is what Paul Thomas Anderson made when he couldn't adapt a Pynchon novel. The script has some relation to "Vineland" and is fashioned from PTA's attempts to adapt it to the screen.
I always thought Pynchon pointless and aimless. If you were a "Sixties person" and had the politics and drug habit that implies, Pynchon's novels might have explained the whole universe to you. If you weren't, you just yawned. His having Irwin Corey accept the NBA for him was a nice touch, though.
It was Philip Roth's notion that America was too weird and chaotic for fiction to contain or describe. He said that about Eisenhower's America, if I'm not mistaken. Fiction writers have done a very good job being crazier than the country -- even now.
How many people under 60 read Mailer or Vidal anymore?
Nobody over 60 is reading them either. Ted Gioia's article may be worth a look:
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-mid-20th-century-american-culture
Speaking of, Susan Cheever's memoir of her father is excerpted in the Paris Review.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/07/my-parents-marriage/
Your parents may have given you a horrible life.
But sometimes you can get a pretty good living off that.
Are they really worth reading i read harlots ghost almost on a dare
How would you even try to adapt vineland its very stream of conscious
Gravity rainbow
To be this naive 50 years later is ridiculous
I can remember Mailer, Updike, and someone else, Roth? Cheever? going after Tom Wolfe for "Bonfire of Vanities". Not "real literature" they sniffed. Just "Journalism". But 40 years later, I can stll read Wolfe and enjoy him while these other guys seem dead, dead, dead.
Cheever was a great short story writer. "The Swimmer" and a few other short stories have stayed with me. But the guy was so Goddamn negative. Everyone's leading a life "Quiet desperation". I guess back in ye olden days if you read one of his stories every month in the New Yorker you didn't mind. But today, reading a collection of his short stories in a book, it gets old - fast.
If you read cheever's journals you can see why his stories are so negative. The guy was depressed, sometimes suicidal, often drunk, and full of guilt. Not the sort of guy to churn out happy, go-lucky stories full of humor and warmth.
In my opinion, the best American story writers of the mid-century are Flannery O'Connor and Bernard Malamud. Eudora Welty was a great prose stylist but her stories don't quite rise up to the heights of O'Connor and Malamud.
I was looking for a new book and saw this one had just came out. One-quarter through and it's fine. Not the best ever, but far far from the worst.
He was much more interesting before he decided to talk.
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