Is Pynchon a "men's thing"?

[Edward Heinemann]

The first - and, in retrospect, most severe - crush I had in college
was on a woman in my freshman dorm who'd read everything Pynchon had
ever written. We didn't talk about Pynchon much, but the bond certainly
helped to cement our friendship - she gave me _Vineland_ for my birthday
that year. Her interest in Pynchon also, I think, probably reflected
the personality traits of hers I found most compelling - her exuberance,
her critical acumen, her physical gusto, her empathy. These certainly
aren't traits absent from most other women, or literary traits unique to
Pynchon, but she was rowdier and more irreverent than women in our society
often feel they can be, and able to stomach sexual grotesqueries and
proceed to understand them for what they often are in Pynchon's writing -
scathing, unflinchingly mimetic critiques of women's roles, sexual and
otherwise, in a techno-patriarchal society.

Another woman Pynchon reader I encountered, a Ph.D. student who taught
one of my classes and with whom I've since become friendly, wrote a chapter
of her (soon-to-be-finished) dissertation on female cartographies
(physical and conceptual) in _V._. (Ooooh, that typography...) Women's
spaces are complicated in _V._, and Pynchon's political sympathies
aren't always clear - "he" seems to take a certain leering thrill, or at
least endorsing stance, toward his male characters' projections of women -
but all in all, my friend argues that _V._ provides a proto-feminist
description of women's societal projections. (She's taken a job in
English and Women's Studies at Rutgers, by the way).

Finally, I gave my (ex-) girlfriend, a feminist studies major, _Vineland_ 
to read, thinking that it provided the best starting point for Pynchon, 
with its somewhat more standard narrative structures, and she thought it 
was "OK, but weird." A less sophisticated response, certainly, and hardly 
a rave, but definitely not an expression of disgust.

So what's my point? Nothing coherent, maybe, except that in my anecdotal
experience, three aggressively feminist women friends have, while finding
certain problems with Pynchon's portrayal of women, found his books to
contain valuable feminist concepts and characters, or at the very least have
not been "put off" by his writing. As for my reading of Pynchon's women...
well, this post has gone on long enough. I'll save it for later.

Ed Heinemann