What does Pynchon think about Lot 49?

[David Casseres]

Monte Davis sez

>I don't believe TRP is pulling your leg at all in crediting Le Carre with
>"upping the ante." The latter does layered, ironic narrative tricks with
>knowledge-foreshadowed, knowledge-rejected, knowledge-dissembled,
>knowledge-the-Marlovian-narrator-just-got, etc, that are real technical
>advances on, say, _What Maisie Knew_  or _The Good Soldier_.
>
>Maybe I shouldn't say "tricks," because they can carry tremendous moral
>weight (the last hours of _The Honourable Schoolboy_ blow me away every
>time).
>
>I take this homage at face value: TRP saying "I've picked up some valuable
>chops from JLC since I wrote this early stuff."

Indeed.  Le Carre also writes a grade of prose that lifts him far above 
the rest of the spy-novel writers, and that makes all the "tricks" of 
narrative technique into part of a fabric of superior writing -- much as 
in Pynchon, though the two are so different in so many ways.



Cheers,
David