Word: pynchon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This is Pynchon's favorite subject, and it was the theme of his first two novels as well as this one. An individual caught in a chaos of facts and fantasies suddenly perceives a pattern to it all, and what first appeared as the incoherent, the arbitrary and the meaningless, is transformed into the possibly intentional. So Herbert Stencil in V. chases around the world and backward in history to find what, if anything, Vera, Valletta, Vheissu and Vogelsang have in common. And Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, drives up and down the Californian coast exploring...
...Pynchon's novels are about interpretation, about making connections in a world of fragments. The novels are built out of too much plot and too many characters; they provide quantities of information far beyond anyone's desire to be informed. They are full of technical disquisitions of differential calculus, organic chemistry, the history of film, jazz and rock, dope and Freud, the Holy Grail, rockets, the Wizard of Oz -- all Pynchon metaphors for the twentieth century. It is not that he is groping for the one correct metaphor to one consistent reality. He is compiling as many metaphors...
...PROBABLY fair to say that the Novel came out of the sixties less dead than it came in. For the most part, that was thanks to the experimentation of people like Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover who were busy providing a set of new literary forms aching for new literary content. And now, just in the past year or so, two novels have appeared that make glimmer the hope that the old Genre might be back on her feet before long. Gravity's Rainbow, when it is working, is one of these, Updike's Rabbit...
...surface, these are two radically different books. Where the Updike is scrupulously realistic, serious-minded and dramatically controlled, the Pynchon is comic, fantastic and deliberately unfocused. Where the Updike restricts himself to a particular set of events in a particular West Pennsylvanian locality, Pynchon's imagination is globe-trotting and without restriction...
...there is at least one crucial similarity between the books, and that is the impulse of both Pynchon and Updike to tell us everything they know, to make novels out of all the incidental details of modern reality...