"Difficult"?

[Sean Klein]

I don't know if I'd label Pynchon as hard.  At least not in the sense of some
technical material I've tried to read in the past, e.g. object oriented
computer programming with C++.  But I would say that Pynchon's work is dense,
which makes it hard or difficult in the sense that we don't have a simple
story to follow in which, at the end the guy gets the girl, the detective
discovers the butler did it, or Jack Ryan gets the bad guys.  It's also
hard or difficult because Pynchon doesn't talk down to his readers, instead
he expects them to come to his level.

Semi-related to this: Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood" at a tenth-grade level
despite obvious ability to produce much superior prose.  He did this
intentionally.  One result was that the book became a best-seller, spawned a
whole new genre, and made him a millionaire.  (Note to all p-list fact checkers:
 I'm presenting this information as something I read about a long time ago.  I
never spoke with TC about this.  In fact, I've never met him, never been to
school with him, or worked with him.)