Life v. Art (was Re: Drugs in Pynchon's fiction

[Doug Millison]

At 5:18 PM -0400 10/28/99, Paul Mackin said "upon reading GR in 1973,
thoughts of the war years, which I had completely shut out of consciousness
for a couple of decades, thrust themselves back into my brain with a force
I can only call uncanny. That's all I meant by GR being ABOUT WWII."  When
I first read GR that same year, sitting on a U.S. Army base very close to
the 38th parallel at the border between North and South Korea, it seemed
clear to me that behind the wonderfully-evoked WWII and other settings, TRP
was talking directly to me, about my experience in the 50s and 60s, and
about the various forces that had acted in such a way as to have me sitting
there, in uniform, doing what I was doing. His voice got in my head in a
way that no other novelist's has, speaking to me about what it means to be
alive right now (then). I can't articulate it as well as I'd like, but I
also think that despite the wide-ranging international material in his
novels, TRP tells a uniquely American story.

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
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