Is Pynchon a "men's thing"?

[Timothy C. May]

Bob Connors puts his academic career in jeopardy by speculating:

> In a conversation I have periodically with a female friend and co-author,
> I was lauding Pynchon and raving about GR, she was listening with a tired
> expression.  Finally she said, "You know, I've tried to read him, and
> lots of people have told me I should love him.  But I just can't read
> that book.  It's such a men's thing.  All that paranoia and abstraction
> and fantasy and technology.  I'm just not interested.  He's a men's
> author, even more than Hemingway--New Age version of True Magazine."
> 
> Woof!  What do you think, gang?  Are there any women on this list?  Is
> she right--is Pynchon the high lit equivalent of skateboarding fanzines?
> Inquiring minds want to know.

Speculations about gender differences, to the extent that women are
not described as superior to men, are of course not allowed. Here in
California, a Class 2 felony. Sexual harassment suits, denial of
tenure, flogging, all that stuff.

But as I have no academic career to worry about, being blissfully on
my own, I can confirm that nearly all of the women I know *despise*
Pynchon. They dislike the emphasis on technology, the paranoia, and
the more extreme sexualy references (in GR, especially). One woman was
disgusted by the idea that V-2 hits would be correlated to
erections...I guess she didn't see any feminist critiques resonating
there. 

One girlfriend wondered why I like Pynchon, so I lent her a good
"starter" novel for her vacation in Denmark. She like "Lot 49," but
was never interested in moving on. Maybe it was the wrong start.

I'm not near by books on TP, but it seems to me that at least one or
two books are either authored by women, or have contributions by
women. Perhaps we could ask them what _they_ think?

In nearly every cyberspatial group I'm in, on mailing lists and in the
main Usenet newsgroups I read, someone always asks: "Where are the
women?" The fact is that women, while reading the Net and even being
dominant in some newsgroups, are mostly turned-off, I think, by the
things that interest us (men). In previous ages this was considered
the norm....the men sat around and talked about fishing, hunting,
technology, the world, politics, and the women sat around and talked
about sewing, children, recipes, families, relations, etc. This was
accepted as OK.

That we no longer consider it "OK," for for various ideological
reasons, does not change the fact (the "ground truth," as Slothrop
might say) that few women are as interested in technology, literary
mechanics, world conspiracies (especially in fun), and strange
fictional worlds as many men are.

As the women like to say, "Get used to it."

--Tim May


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