Done at last.

[Brian D. McCary]

Wow: I finally manage to kill off the last 200 pages of M&D on Cape
Cod, (I was doing fine, then we hit the hunt for the guilty phase at
work about the same time the group read started, and I bailed for a
while) and I get back from vacation on a little high, and WHAM there's
another little tiff going.  So I'm throwing in my two coppers.

If I could write a book half as good as M&D, I'd be doing that instead
of designing medical equipment.  If I *thought* I could write something
half as good, I'd be doing that instead of what I do.  I don't know how
to even consider whether M&D is as good as GR.  I'm not even sure that
GR is as good as GR. If Pynchon wrote M&D in '73, and GR today, what
would our reaction be to it?  I found that I was reading M&D in the
context of everything else he has written, which probably made it
better than it would have been on it's own, but that is also a problem
with GR.

At least Pynchon has put together an oeuvre which is worth considering
as such.  There is a trajectory to his work.  While I don't think M&D
has the powerful audacity that GR has, I also think that in his
maturity, he has been willing to moderate the paranoia of two decades
ago, which is what I really like about M&D.

Some may feel disappointed because he is less definite in M&D.
Earlier, he seemed willing to say "there is a conspiracy, and I'm
letting you in on it".  Now, there seems to be more willingness to
suggest that, perhaps, it only appears to be a real conspiracy, that
what is going on is much more complicated.  Paranoia is a romantic
ideal.  It's a wonderful device for reducing a complicated world to a
simple one.  Like all romantic approaches, sometimes it's right,
usually it's wrong.  Those out there looking for simple answers, the
idea that everything's connected and someone is pulling the strings,
can revel in GR's dark vision, but they may feel gyped when, a quarter
century later, the holy preist proclaims that after thinking about it
some more, he might have gotten some parts wrong.  Maybe they were
conned, but it was way back in the seventies when they took GR at face
value, not now when they look for M&D to back it up and reassure them.

I started out hating all the tall tale stuff (the were-beaver, 
the Golem, the vegetables, ect) but I really grew to like it at
the end.  In fact, I think there is something a little revolutionry
about them.  If Barth can spend the first part of his career reworking
Arabic frame tales, why shouldn't Pynchon muck around for a while
with the Pecos Bill/John Henry/Paul Bunyon Folk idiom?  I remember
reading all those collected tall tales and hearing all those wild
long folk songs avidly when I was growing up.  It's just as much a 
part of Literature as the more formal written part.  (In fact, when
I got to thinking about this on the flight back, I was distinctly 
reminded of the Residents, who put did a whole show based around
the premis that pop/rock music had a dual parentage, both the black
blues and the white country traditions).

Plus, as Penny points out, I think that there is some very interesting
things going on about fathers and sons here, both in Mason's relationship
with his sons, but also in his relationship with his father.  Knowing
that Pynchon's father was a surveyor makes this all the more intriguing:
Was the old man the person who originally exposed him to M&D?  (Side
thought, M&D => Mom & Dad....) How did they get along, out on those
road crews?  Did he have to come around to his own understanding,
for the same reason, writing:surveying => stargazing:baking.  There's
way too much going on here to dismiss this book as a failure, although
it's hardly an unqualified success.

Other reading:  Tom Sharpe's "Riotous Assembly", the first book to 
make me laugh over and over for a long time.  Wish I read this when
it first came out in the early seventies.  Set in South Africa,
with extended riffs on slavery and the slave/master relationship,
and a savage meditation on the gallows.  

Background Music:  I want to second Andrew's comments about Ute Lemper.
I've had her German Caberet songs in rotation for the summer,
and they would work great as part of a GR sound-track.  And for
meditating on M&D, there's North England's own Jes Lowe, (sometimes
of the Bad Pennies) doing old and new folk songs, including "The
Old Duhram Road".  It's worth hearing, if you can find it.

Brian McCary