PYNCHON IN PULSE

[Steelhead]

Am I really the only one who thinks that Bowman is more than half right,here?

That the Lotion interview wasn't even up to Esquire's pathetic standards,
that it is yet one more piece of evidence that TRP is continuing the long
slide toward premature senility (or, perhaps, perpetual DTs) first
manifested in the Tinasky letters,then reprised, full-blown, in the
embarrassingly bad Vineland, the trivial NYT's piece on sloth (from a real
expert, it appears), the incoherent review of Garcia Marquez's haunting
novel Love in the Time of Cholera (which reads like a book review written
by a second-rate Tom Robbins imitator, trying seduously--paragraph after
paragraph--to come up with some snappy snippet of praise that might hitch a
ride on the cover of the paperback edition, just to remind people
that--though a shadow of his former self--is still out there somehwere) and
the inane scribbling of Spike Jones liner notes?

I certainly hope the "new" work is really the old novel that has been
locked up in the musty Viking vaults these many years, instead of some
contemporary piece of pomo dreck that promises to be as revelatory and
exciting as yet another Stephens Stills apprearance on the state fair circuit.

Steely