Word: pynchon
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FICTION: Edisto, Padgett Powell God's Pocket, Pete Dexter ∙ Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney Testing the Current, William McPherson ∙ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera...
Through all the awards, invitations and beseechings that accompany success, Pynchon remained an invisible...
Slow Learner, a collection of five short stories written and published while the author was in his early 20s, has no photograph on the dust jacket. Pynchon fans have come to expect that. The book does offer one major surprise: a 20-page introduction that amounts to Pynchon's first public gesture toward autobiography. Yet for all the apparent candor of these remarks, buyers should still beware. Pynchon criticizes the young writer he once was on a number of counts: for having a tin ear for dialogue, for tailoring plots and characters to the design of abstract concepts...
This statement, coming from the author of Gravity's Rainbow, is simply not credible. If he can absorb and then brilliantly embellish the scientific progress that led up to the development of the V-2 rocket, he can look up tendril in a dictionary. And Pynchon's stories are not as bad as he claims. The Small Rain rather artfully juxtaposes the tedium of peacetime Army service, a catastrophic hurricane and sex. The Secret Integration accurately catches the locutions of an alcoholic jazz musician. Under the Rose is an evocative spy story set in a kind of operetta...
...whole, Pynchon's early works are flawed but disciplined exercises by an apprentice who already senses the sorcerer he will become. Pynchon's attempt to dismiss himself as just a regular guy is charming but a little disturbing, suggesting a weariness with the task of being different. He even includes a sentence that implicitly questions the wisdom of remaining in hiding: "Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite." This might be taken to mean...