Cowart on Vineland

[Jane]

"Pynchon exposes the millenarian canker in the flower
children as rigorously as he diagnoses the reactionary
carcinoma of the next generation...Pynchon makes his
political sympathies plain enough. But the polemics have
little to do with the novel's art, which one sees in the
indirection and economy that deliver this and the other
Pynchon works from the realm of propaganda and didacticism.
This author's art--an art far superior, it seems to me, to
that od such novelists on the left as Dos Passos, Steinbeck
or Vonegut--commands the aesthetic interest of readers  who
may find the politics somewhat overwrought...He remains the
only contemporary writer whose grasp of history's mythic
dimensions merits comparison with that of Joyce..."  


I think one of the most interesting clues to Pynchon's view
of things is that he has Jess Becker quoting James quoting
Emerson, "Secret retributions are always restoring the
level, when disturbed, of the divine justice." 

Jumpin Jane O'