No fawning P-cultie, I

[Steve Robinson]

> Someone on the list a few days ago suggested that one reason to get excited
> about the upcoming M&D is that it is a long book.  As David Thornburn and
> others have pointed out, length ain't strength.  GR's chief fault is that
> it lacks a good story.  As Pynchon himself points out, anyone can recite
> almanac facts, or in his case, encyclopedia facts.  But I, for one, don't
> read novels for their dazzling link-up of arcana, and I suggest that few
> literary works that are generally (note: I did NOT say universally) revered
> lack a good yarn.  

Nor I a fawning P-cultie.  But there are stories (yarns) within GR that 
have haunted me since first reading: that of Tchitcherine, and Katje, and 
Leni and Franz Pokler, and Roger and Jessica . . . these are the stories that
pulled me through the novel.  When you listen to Beethoven, you get theme 
and theme restated and theme inverted and theme in a minor key and theme 
lydian, and you listen with the understanding that Ludwig's never 
getting too far away from the central story line, the plot.  When you 
listen to . . . . hmmmm, how about Coltrane's A Love Supreme, you get 
teased with theme, it hides and surfaces, there's a suggestion that there 
is no theme, you have to strain to remember hearing theme.  GR, in my 
reading, is like that--the weave of stories <is> the novel.  But it just 
ain't gonna denouement like Mill On the Floss.