Advice on GR

[Rodney Welch]

The reader who has picked up GR for the first time is in for a 
real, um, well -- I'm not sure "treat" is the right word. Experience? 
Yes -- unlike any other. I first read GR when I was 18, after reading 
some critic who said it was the greatest novel of the Seventies. I 
went all the way to the last page without understanding very much at 
all -- but that's the way I was then. I think I understood more from the 
reviews I read. Something about a rocket, something about erections, 
and some two or three stomach-churning pages about eating shit. A good 
ten years later I picked it up again, knowing I was more mature and so 
forth and so on. It still baffled me -- and it still exerted an 
extraordinary pull. There is something very narcotic about Pynchon's 
prose -- those long, winding sentences that start in nebraska and 
wind up on the far side of Jupiter. Two or three years ago, I read it 
again -- each time, I feel I get a little better at it. Same way with V. 
-- but there are narrative breaks in the story that still throw me; the 
time will no doubt come when I approach the entire Pynchon ouevre like a 
pure scholar, with a pen and paper and ompanion volumes and Pynchonite 
friends -- which are not at all hard to find in any university 
town. (I live in Columbia, SC.) This is why Gore Vidal hated the book 
so much -- it's what he called a U-novel, or university-novel, which 
generally means a boring piece of academic fiction that has nothing to do 
with anything and is written less to entertain than to be taught. 
(An odd assessment from Italo Calvino's number one fan, but no 
matter...)
But for all the time I've spent in the company of GR, I never recall 
being bored -- perplexed, yes, but never bored. Over time, it repays 
ebvery amount of attention you pay to it.

RW