What does Pynchon think about Lot 49?

[Brian D. McCary]

I've been watching the Mascaro/Dinn debate on CL49, - occasionally short
tempered & a bit nasty, but basically clean.  Nice going, guys.  I like
the idea of CL49 being a schematic or map of his style and larger works.  Since
the whole thing flared up originally when Andrew noted that Pynchon 
discounted CL49, I went back and reread all of Slow Learner, including
the intro, and CL49 this weekend.  I even reread Mercy & Mortality, to try
to understand why it was left out of SL.  Here's what I got out of it.

The intro consists of Pynchon systematically listing flaws in his 
writing and drawing supporting evidence from the five stories.  I count
about a dozen seperate ones, although the exact number depends on how
you break them up.  They include "Bad Ear", the way the characters deal
with death, the way the sex is described, making too much up, not 
checking sources, misusing words, overwriting, misunderstanding entropy,
trying to build a story with flat characters on a concept alone, usw.  It's
really a very interesting and useful list.  Several times he seems to 
indicate that he felt his writing *still* (as of 1984) had some of those
flaws.

He ends by noting that the last story, The Secret Integration, was written 
after V, and that over all, he's pretty satisfied with it.  He then says
that the data suggests that this growth trend would not continue indefinitely.
This is followed by the infamous remark, right at the end of the intro,
that his next act was writing CL49, which was marketed as a novel, and in
which he appears to have forgotten everything he learned up to that point
about writing.

The implication is that the problem with CL49 is largely technical, not
stylistic or conceptual.  He is not saying CL49 is a bad book; he is saying
it is a badly written book.  It may be a fine example of 60's literature,
or modern or post-modern literature, it may say important things, it may
fit into some logical progression in his work, it might be similar to the
work of Chandler or Hammet or both, it might even be fun to read, 
but it's not, by the standards he outlines and according to his opinion, 
well written. 

Re-reading CL49 with his checklist brought me to the same conclusion.  I've
never felt that it was the on the same level as GR and V, and I think it's
because parts of it felt clunky to me.  GR & V may be difficult at times, and
they also have spots which fail his criteria, but the ratio of "well written"
to "poorly written" by his standards seems much higher the the longer
works.

This is what CL49 has in common with the few Chandler/Hammet works I've
read.  They, too, seem to have higher ambitions than the normal detective 
story, the plots are solid, they are fun, but they show their hack roots
occasionally.  (None of them are as bad as all that Travis McGee / Matt Helms
stuff I devoured growing up.  I think I'd still rather read Ed McBain)

Now I suppose the thing to do is reread Vineland with the same approach,
to see if my difficulties with it are fundamentally differant.

Brian McCary