Paucity of TRP materials

[Steve Robinson]

On Wed, 22 May 1996, Bruce Appelbaum wrote:

>      
>      Finished GR?  I've been trying to read it since it came out in Bantam 
>      paperback 20+ years ago.  I pick it up every so often, read the same 
>      initial chapters, and usually manage to get another 20 or 30 pages 
>      into it.  I've gotten as far as the end of the first part.

I think that there's a hump in GR, that the first 300-350 pages are 
hard to get through.  At the time I first read it (which was the minute I 
could get my hands on it after publication), I thought that this was 
intentional, that TRP was almost weeding out readers who wouldn't wrestle 
with his science, his scatology, his humor, his everything that violated 
what we expect from novels.  And that once you got through that, and 
accepted what he was doing and the world he was creating in GR, it just 
took off.  Once you get over the hump, you start hitting passages of 
sheer narrative brilliance that, as long as you can keep the cerebral 
absurdity at a reasonable bay, can be read effortlessly.  Keep at it.

Steve Robinson