What makes TRP's writing his?

[Andrew Dinn]

Brian D. McCary writes:

> Which raises the quesition: What makes Pynchon's writing uniquely his?
> What characteristics should a piece have before it may properly be described
> as "Pynchonian"?  I know what I think of when I think of him:

> 1)	Wordplay, crosscultural puns, meanings in names, ect (see recent posts)
> 2)	Overt theams of paranoia, and specifically cabals and coverups
> 3)	Pop Culture Hooks
> 4)	"Encyclopidic" historical and scientific referances
> 5)	Use of basic science concepts as central metephors and structuring
> 		devices (entropy, ballistics, organic chemistry, ect)
> 6)	Nondeterministic story lines, the dissolution of Slothrop and V
> 		being the prime but not the only examples
> 7)	Rapid stylistic intercutting (low comedy to high tragedy to 
> 		introspection)

I get the impression that when Vineland came out one of the big causes
of disappointment for most readers, lay and academic, was the absence
of 2, 4 and 6 and the limited appearances made by 1 and 5. Even 3 is
down-market wrt GR expectations since the pop culture is so brash,
modern and dissipated, none of the ritual associated with older
notions of fashion, not burnished with the patina peculiar to
nostalgia. So is Vineland not Pynchon? Or just second-rate Pynchon?

I don't think it's so simple as that. Vineland is a good book - it
only looks liek a bad book when you judge it by the `GR'eat book set
of criteria - and it is most defiitely a Pynchon book. I suspect that
an exhaustive list of features is not very useful since none of them
is guaranted to be ever-present - at best it's a disjunction, not a
conjunction and oh lookee here that's the entropic route (a Vel not
and And).


Andrew Dinn
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|    Yeah, there's that `A' but look at those two `V's at the end
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