Review in New Yorker (was "other pairings, no spoiler")

[Meg Larson]

----------
> From: still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made
<traveler at afn.org>
> To: Paul Murphy <paul.murphy at utoronto.ca>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: M&D -- other pairings (no spoiler)
> Date: Monday, May 12, 1997 5:37 PM
> 
> On Sat, 10 May 1997, Paul Murphy wrote:
> > 
> > (Lane's review is one of the more perceptive and sympathetic ones I've
read
> > yet).
>
A friend gave me a copy of Lane's review, and I agree w/ Paul's statement
above, with one exception:  the way he begins his review.
  
"Thomas Pynchon published his first book, _V._ in 1963, and to this day
nobody is quite sure what, if anything, that lonely initial stands for. 
The title of his third, and grandest, work, _Gravity's Rainbow_, refers to
the trajectory of a wartime rocket; but only in part.  It may also, for
instance, point to the inevitable earthbound arc that is desribed by our
mortal life; or again, if memory serves, to the curve of a stocking top as
it loops up to and away from the clip of its restraining garter.  Pynchon
nuts, who in the league of nuts are outstripped only by
Kennedy-assassination wonks, will therefore suffer a brutal shock when they
discover that the fifth, and latest, Pynchon novel, _Mason & Dixon_, really
is about Mason and Dixon"
(Lane, 97).

I don't know about the rest of you nuts, but I knew that the novel was
really about M&D.  The insult--comparing us to Kennedy-ass. nuts-- aside,
it is one of the best reviews I've read so far.  I hope you get your copy
soon, Max. 

Meg