Bruce Powe (M&D reviewed in The Globe and Mail)

[Paul Murphy]

Kenneth Houghton writes:

>     Interesting.  A search for Powe on the web shows him to be mostly
>     related to explicating McLuhan.
[snip]
>     Sounds as if the review will at least be interesting.

It is. (The Globe does not post book reviews to their website however).
Powe, author of _Outage_, reviews M&D in the Globe and Mail by offering an
A-to-Z lexicon (A: America, B: Book, C: Comic, and so on. He only cheats
with X, "for extra"). It's a clever strategy, and he touches on a number of
issues and themes germane to the book, while interpolating his own
McLuhanesque agenda at some points.

Some excerpts of general interest (NO SPOILERS): "G. Good. Is it good? ...
At times I thought M&D was a reading ordeal, a test, a threat to my sanity,
with its length and self-indulgence and obscurity and heavy-handed
exposition, a deliberate attempt to defy the common reader (another
18th-century conception). At other times I found myself opening entirely to
Pynchon's vision and risky rhythms; I entered his labyrinth, saw
associations, laughed at the puns and one-liners, was moved by his lyrical
flights."

"Z. Zenith ... This novel [represents] alphabetic culture at its zenith;
when a logorrhea-prone recluse like Pynchon huddles for years to write an
opus, the result is this kind of word-enchanted expression. The summit and
summa of the phenomenon of the Book: It becomes a weighty thing, a
swallower of time and space (the time it takes to read it; the space you
need on a shelf for it), a mammoth maze where you can wander and easily
lose yourself, a tome that threatens to entomb the reader in private
passions, a monument to the rarest of qualities, the true maverick
imagination."

Cheers,
Paul