Word: pynchon
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...breed is rare. Aside from Roth, Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, it is hard to think of many other contemporaries who consistently qualify. Humorists go strictly for laughs, and more power to them. Roth and Elkin take a different direction; they pretend that they would gladly stick to brass tacks and the big issues if only the world were not so loony. The hero of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth's most celebrated novel, cries out to his psychiatrist: "Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle...
...took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long émigré life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future novelist, Thomas Pynchon. Somewhere in his own imagination glimmered at least two future academic portraits, the title character of Pnin and the poet John Shade of Pale Fire...
FICTION Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: technology and slapstick raised to the nth power...
...there are writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most...
...blinks on overhead, we sink into our seats and careen off into the wild blue '80s. And it becomes harder and harder to analyze and thus understand the slothful indulgences and psychotic tendencies of that great unruly beast, the American Imperium. Our best writers have tried--and mostly failed--Pynchon, with the wondrous Gravity's Rainbow, a critical mass of incendiary pages, and McGuane, with his taut vision of love and death in the Florida Keys, 92 in the Shade. No wonder there is so much yearning for that time of the superego run rampant, the 1960s. Where is Norman...