The Bad Priest

[Edward Heinemann]

Greetings from a looooong-time lurker. I've just received a rather singular
request from a dear friend, one Heikki Raudaskoski, whose name may ring
a bell with some of you. He's asked me to vouch that he is indeed a He - a
proposition that some of you seem to doubt - since I've seen him in the 
flesh, in an enchanted visit last July, under Finland's generous midnight
sun. So I will: no clockwork female genitalia lurk under the male facade
that Heikki presents, at least as far as I could tell when he stepped out of 
the sauna. I know that Finnish can be daunting for those of you out there who
haven't been exposed to the Finno-Ugric language family - and the 
resemblance of Heikki's name to that of "Heidi," the dear little iconic 
Germanic maiden, *does* give pause - but Heikki is a Very Masculine
Name, as Finnish names go. Not quite as masculine as Jukka or Pekka, but
close...
 
Not that it matters...And for all you know, I'm Heikki Herself, posing
as an American boy to throw you off...
 
But now that I have your attention...I've just re-read "V." for the first
time in 4 years, and what strikes me most about the book, especially in
comparison to GR - the touchstone text for my readings of TP - is the
*style*, of all things. The writing seems resolutely anti-lyrical: sentences
are chopped short, easy opportunities for high-flown Pynchonesque locutions
are foregone, and the diction seems intentionally shoddy. Maybe Pynchon
merely hadn't developed the lyrical abilities he displayed later in GR, but
the work displays too much control for the style to be accounted for in a
*negative* way, by any *lack* of ability (and devastatingly lyrical passages
*do* pop up every 50 or 100 pages, the first one being the description of the
clock in Schoenmaker's ("beautiful-maker's," I just realized) office). Some
of this probably comes indirectly from the Beat influences he admits to in the
intro to "Slow Learner" (the Beats, of course, were ridiculously lyrical, but
their "roughness" seems to have helped liberate TP from the modernists'
compulsive elegance), and from the reportage-voice he obviously strives to
put forth (as in the recounting of the Almanac-disasters of the Dog Days of
1956 (has anybody ever looked these up to see if they're genuine, by the
way?)), but that's not all that's going on here. Any thoughts? Has anything
of substance been published on Pynchon's style, and on its variation from
work to work (the contrast between, say, GR and Vineland would seem
likely to have prompted reams of ruminations)? McHoul and Wills's book
"Writing Pynchon" comes to mind as an excellent source of insights on the
ways in which clusters of words operate in each of TP's books, but that's
not quite what I'm getting at...Anything?
 
Adios,
 
Ed