Word: pynchon
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SLOW LEARNER by Thomas Pynchon...
...public consciousness does not combine easily with the desire to go through life unnoticed. Witness the besieged reclusiveness of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and the late Howard Hughes. They all made the same mistake: trying to change the rules of celebrityhood after they had become household faces. Author Thomas Pynchon, 46, apparently anticipated this problem during his adolescence. The only photograph of him to surface publicly shows a typical American teen-age male circa mid-1950s: crew cut, protuberant ears and a sleepy stare. Since then, nothing, not even a forwarding address; rumor has him spending a lot of time...
...first novel, V. (1963), with its fusion of paranoia and surrealism, provided one of the most impressive literary debuts of the decade. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), shorter and more straightforward than its predecessor, won more converts to the growing Pynchon cult. And the encyclopedic Gravity's Rainbow (1973) stunned both critics and readers as the most ambitious American novel since Moby Dick...
Unfortunately, the self-satire becomes very tiresome. Self-conscious but not detached, Confidentially Yours neither works as frank satire, nor does it hold the suspense of a thriller. The bizarre jumbled reality of Vercel's world has more in common with that of a Thomas Pynchon novel than with the finely-crafted artifice of the classic film noir. Pynchon, however, has wit. Sustaining little of the illusion that is vital in, for example, Scarlet Street, Confidentially Yours makes no bones of having ketchup for blood and a pacemaker for a heart. The movie actually seems to be the director...
King is not the first to turn his fiction over to the echo chamber of pop culture. Writers as dissimilar as Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme have toyed for years with the mass-produced icons that have invaded the communal memory. But King takes them dead seriously, and so, evidently, do his millions of readers. A devoted child of the audiovisual age, the millionaire author still likes to get up in the morning and switch on rock 'n' roll. King, his wife Tabitha and their three children alternate between an airy modern house in a Maine village...