Word: pynchon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least he wasn't alone. He knew that. Others had realized it long ago; Kesey in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Pynchon in "V," Heller in "Catch-22." He had friends, people who took his side. He felt a common bond, even with the people he had never met. They, too, understood...
...underestimates the American public will never go broke!" cried "Professor" Irwin Corey, paraphrasing H.L. Mencken to a dazed National Book Awards' audience in Manhattan. Standing in for Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1973 fiction prize with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, Comedian Corey confused the assembled authors, critics and publishers with a frenetic routine, prompting some to think that he was really the reclusive Pynchon himself. Others believed that his performance was a clever parody of Pynchon's tortuous style. The ceremonies were...
What makes the honesty questionable is Gardner's reputation as an anti-novelist. He is associated with names like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, whose styles often reflect the immense panorama of futility and anarchy they see around them. For these men literary conventions only pose limitations and rules to be broken, and narrative becomes hopelessly narcissistic. In John Barth's story, Lost in the Funhouse, for example, the author interrupts to explain the narrative techniques of the short story while the tale is in progress. Barth then shows contempt for these forms and simultaneously complains...
...American writers since World War II has been their fear of dirtying their novelistic hands by getting too close to reality. So there has been a general tendency to retreat into myth or parody or the kind of halfway realism that takes place in the suburbs of reality. But Pynchon and Updike, in their last books, have thrown themselves into the ugly, unpoetical stuff of this society in these times. They are making novels out of sex and racism, hamburger stands, dope dealing, babysitting and used cars, moon shots and television sets...
Unlike Updike, though, Pynchon is writing nothing that can properly be called a realistic novel. He is taking these bits and pieces of reality and recombining them in a fantastic approximation of what might have been but could never be. It is a way of addressing reality without surrendering to it, one more attempt to write good books...