What is Pynchonian?

[Monte Davis]

You addressed well the stylistic effects he achieves with those riffs on
more or less technical arcana. I'd just add that as a science teacher for a
short time, then a science writer for a long time, I'm always conscious of
the structural challenges and doubts about context they entail:

Do I stop here and do a mini-riff on DNA vs. RNA? or should I go back and
spread it in bits and pieces in the earlier exposition?

How many readers know who James Clark Maxwell was? and if I mention "ether"
getting from him to FitzGerald or Einstein, how many have a feel for the
different kind of fiction it represented to each of them?

How long will they remember which was von Braun and which was Dornberger?
How smoothly can I embed a hint to remind 'em?

 etc, etc, etc... see Richard Rhodes' excellent new "Deadly Feasts" (on
kuru, scrapie, "mad cow disease," etc.) for how slickly it can be done in
non-fiction. 

At a nuts 'n bolts level apart from the Big Literary Picture, TRP is very,
very good at this. He does assume a depth and intensity of reader interest
any science teacher or writer would yearn for, but given that, he plays
scrupulously fair with "what you need to know to make sense of B and
connect it to A". And, of course,  he writes so damn well that he earns
that depth and intensity from anyone less brain-damaged than, say, a
book-award judge.

-Monte

PS -- "A real working knowledge" can cover a multitude of inadequacies --
for teachers, science writers, and TRP. Things that he and others have
written assure me that sometimes he skims the cream of a topic, and
tap-dances from fact to fact so well that he *gives the impression* of more
knowledge than he in fact has. But that's a perfectly legitimate artistic
move in itself, like the Hitchcock "profile" caricature that somehow
summons up the man in a curve and a squiggle.