<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=4 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><B>Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"></B> </FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><BR>
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by David Kipen<BR>
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Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to reward it. So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around, the case might yet remain something shy of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?" Answers to the first two boil down to "You name it" and "Who do you think?" But trying to explain why a piece of writing wipes the floor with just about anything else published this year is, necessarily, trickier. Pynchon's foreword expertly re-creates the atmosphere surrounding the composition and reception of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," but any gifted literary historian might have managed that. He articulates an unsentimental humanism relevant to developing events, but an uncommonly perceptive political essayist might have done the same. Where Pynchon doesn't just outpace but laps the rest of the field is in his incomparably supple style. <BR>
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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/03/DD302378.DTL&type=books<BR>
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