Lurkers Awake!

[Teen Age Riot]

At 07:32 PM 1/24/96 MST, Chris Stolz wrote:
>
>Me, I'm the opposite:  my fave by far is _CL49_.  I think _GR_ is
>turgid, over-written, fundamentally simplistic and too full of
>pointless purple prose.  For all that, I still like it some.
>_CL49_ is elegant, eliptical and suggestive where _GR_ is overly
>baroque.

My initial impression of GR was one of flabbergasted awe.  It intrigued me
because it seemed I could read it for a lifetime and never truly feel that I
"owned" the text, and I loved it for that.  On the other hand, COL49 seemed
clever, but more static: I could read it and move on, fairly confident that
there wasn't too much more to be mi out of some 200 pages.  V struck me as
somewhere very comfortably in between.  

The more time I spend with the three, however, the GR and COL49 seemed to
converge in this aspect towards V. :)  COL49 is deceptively concise, and not
nearly as simplistic as I had first thought.  GR, on the other hand, pieces
itself together a bit at a time with each passage that I reread.(But I am
still new to the book)

A coupla points:

How does Vineland fit into the above?  It doesn't, really, not yet. For
whatever reasons, it still hasn't affected me on the same level as the other
three.  Sure I enjoyed it, and sure, it was funny as all hell, but I really
haven't thought about it much since I first read it.Of course, that's what I
said about COL49 at first too, so gimme some time.

I still don't think I'd call GR fundamentally simplistic. Its themes are
seemingly endless and divergent, and I wouldn't think of trying to define a
unifying message for the book.

I would agree that Oedipa is the most two-dimensional of Pynchon's
"protagonists", particularly odd, in that she's the closest to the classic
protagonist that I can find from TRP.  Neither Slothrop, Stencil, or
Profane, intentionally or not, wield as much control over his/her own
actions as Oedipa, yet she comes off as the least human of the four, or at
least the least fully-fleshed.

Al


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al wang
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