How To Use Pynchon In A Sentence
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(Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.)
February 2010
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Certainly not in either of Pynchon's subsequent novels, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, each of which has its many excellences, but neither of which anyone is planning to take with them to the moon.
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If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, bothfor Doc and for the reader.
February 2010
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He was, as appears to be the too-obvious definition that seems to cow reviewers by its obviousness, the true crafter of a postmodern 'sincerity' -- a seemingly impossible task in the wake of Pynchon and the psychosexual slapstick of characters like "Oedipa Maas" and "Tyrone Slothrop.
Omer Rosen: Footnoting David Foster Wallace: Part 1
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In fact, it's sometimes incurious about his life and work, concentrating rather on the mix of fragments, whispers and urban myths that have arisen about Pynchon, due to his aversion to being photographed or interviewed.
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But a truly great critic would take on the actual arguments, interpretations, and exegeses of Pynchon’s most eloquent and intelligent admirers.
2010 July | NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS
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People aren't interested in deconstructing the intricacies of Foucaultian power structures in Thomas Pynchon novels -- they are interested in City of Heroes.
Of course it's hard -- if it wasn't hard, everyone would do it
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I can't post about Novi Pazar without quoting one of my favorite bits from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous century of British policy on the Eastern Question, for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe:
Languagehat.com: "BOSNIAN" IN NOVI PAZAR.
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Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Gravity's Rainbow a "Menippean Satire," as a number of Pynchon scholars have pointed out, but one of the great accomplishments of the novel has been its ability to incorporate other and multifarious literary (and non-literary) forms without sacrificing its own integrity as an identifiable (if omni-directed) literary form in its own right.
Postmodernism
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Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow, the vocoder is a vehicle, a proxy for forces bigger than the freaks-Egyptian Lover, JFK-who employ it.
Village Voice - The most recent 10 stories
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I don't doubt the applicability of Wood's distinction between "mild tragi-comedy" -- what he will go on to identify as "humor" more properly understood -- and the "comic" as illustrated in Sterne or Pynchon.
Comedy in Literature
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Gibbons draws a viable enough distinction between the intricate formalism of Perec's fiction and the "expansiveness" of Pynchon, Wallace, and Vollmann (whose work might be more accurately characterized by what Tom LeClair has called the "art of excess"), but I wonder about the utility of of attributing these differences to national or geographical qualities -- "commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent.
Art and Culture
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For Pynchon, the hieroglyph hints at, but ultimately frustrates, hermeneutic operations, leaving the interpreter faced with a social text whose key either has been irretrievably lost or never existed in the first place.
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In temperament and style DeLillo is Apollonian, a secret sharer with his technocrats and obsessives, whereas Pynchon is chthonic, in touch with darker gods.
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The editorial file I examined has some obvious lacunae and is very thin on letters from Pynchon (someone probably filched them, alas).
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Thomas Pynchon has also shown a consistent fondness for slapstick effects in his novels, drawn partly from comic cinema.
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He excoriates the McSweeney's crowd and "the ridiculous dithering of John Barth ... [and] the reductive cardboard constructions of Donald Barthelme," and would excise from the modern canon "nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo," and — while he's at it — "the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses ... the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of late Nabokov.
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