"Difficult"?

[Brian D. McCary]

Andrew writes:
	"If a 17 year old said the same of Moby Dick he would be told to
do his homework again. The reviewers who perpetrate the myth that
Pynchon is obscure and unreadable need to be told the same."

Exactly.  Pynchon is no more difficult to read than most college freshman
English material.  He requires a certain level of scientific, mathematical,
and historical literacy, (or at least the willingness aquire some) but nothing
beyond the capabilities of an intellectually engaged high school senior.  He
also requires a commitment to read carefully:  although I read his work
for entertainment, he's not entertaining me - I'm entertaining myself.

In certain ways, his books are meta-parables built out of a large but finite
set of interlocking koans, connected, like the cubes in a teseract, in ways
which are not immediately obvious to the unpracticed three-dimensional viewer.
Sometimes you can see some of the connections without "getting" or even seeing
some of the koans.  Sometimes you get the koans, but don't see the connections
until much later.  Even when you have a vision of what he is saying, you can't
really "get" what it means; rather, you get what it means for you at that 
particular time.  Like any parable, you give a meaning to - instead of getting
a meaning from - his stories.

And I don't put effort into reading his work primarily because the story, in
the end, is gonna be so great.  Instead, I work at it because I find that
the more I do, the more I see in the world around me.  That's the value in
TRP's work for me, as compared to, say, Barth.  "Giles Goat Boy" renders a
fairly compact and interesting take on the Cold War and western civilization,
and is very entertaining, but I, for one, didn't walk away from it with the
same sense of wonder about the world around me that I had when I got finished
with GR.  That's why I gladly put up with the things I don't like about his
writing.

Brian McCary.