Word: pynchon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...though you probably ought to dabble in it a bit, during commercials, just to find out what the fuss is all about (I recommend in particular pgs. 41-2, 59, 73, 115-20, 214, 317, 349-50, 382, 396-433, 520-21, 558, 587-91, 616, 720-23, 759). Pynchon novels never conclude anyway; they just stop getting longer...
...misunderstand. Pynchon is indeed one of the few ground-breaking authors around; it's simply that ground doesn't break at every stroke. So the achievement in this book has nothing to do with the novel as a whole, Gravity's Rainbow self-contained and entire. The achievement lies in some things that happen to happen while the novel is going on: like Pynchon's mystical/political/scientific vision, or new ideas of plot and character, or the prose style--for example...
...novel a propos of nothing else at all. The two characters appear here for the first time and never appear again--the event passes as quickly as it came. There are hundreds of such vignettes in the book, glimpsed actions, characters scurrying in and out of focus. Pynchon has no great interest in making these fragments cohere; his method is rather to take the loose ends of story and unravel them altogether...
...THEN AGAIN, perhaps not. For Pynchon is fondest, above all, of ambiguity. And just as more and more evidence grows to confirm the conspiracy theory, so too grows the likelihood that it is all just a paranoid's hallucination...
...mystery genre often seems an anachronism in twentieth century literature. We are not used to seeing all the pieces fit into place, all the ambiguities resolved, all the motivations defined. Even in such a vast, intertwining maze as Thomas Pynchon's new novel Gravity's Rainbow, we find dozens of false leads mixed among all the character recurrences and evolving relationships...