out from the shadows...

[Christopher James Tassava]

Spurred by the recent exhortations to delurk, I'm asking a question 
that's bugged me since I began to read the works of Our Hero.  I'll get 
to that in a second.  I, like someone else who recently posted, came to 
Pynchon out of the blue.  I picked up _GR_ in my hometown B. Dalton (?!) 
and tried to read it my senior year of high school.  I had a go at it, 
but when I got to those infamous pages on which the Brigadier encounters 
his dominatrix, I was stopped cold (also, disgusted).  This fall, though, 
having had my mind expanded by a four hyper-liberal years at college, I 
took another shot at it.  I fared better this time, partly because I was 
enrolled in the "Reading _Gravity's Rainbow_" seminar at Chicago's 
Newberry Library and partly because it was so much more interesting this 
time.  Along the way, I read the rest of Our Hero's canon.  It's good 
stuff, but now I'm preaching to the converted.  Anyhow, my question(s):

I've read (in the _GR_ companion, most notably) about certain critics 
who, for various reasons, have panned _GR_ and the rest of Our Hero's 
works.  What are the basis of these negative reviews of Pynchon's work?  
Do they go after Tom's style, his substance, his "message", or what?  Any 
insights and/or directions to the critical criticism would be greatly 
appreciated.

Eagerly awaiting silent Trystero's empire,

Christopher James Tassava

ctass at suba.com

P.S.:  If the W.A.S.T.E. system actually exists, wouldn't it be a lot 
like our beloved medium?  I mean, the Net's almost totally deregulated, 
underground in many ways, anti-centralized, and often used simply to send 
meaningless crap from one person to another...