Old Pynchon mention

[MalignD at aol.com]

Quite by chance, I came upon this somewhat unlikely comparison of Roth and 
Pynchon, made by Harold Bloom in 1985 in a review of Zuckerman Bound, a 
single volume comprising the novels, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The 
Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy.

"Zuckerman Bound" merits something reasonably close to the highest level of 
esthetic praise for tragicomedy, partly because as a formal totality it 
becomes much more than the sum of its parts. Those parts are surprisingly 
diverse: "The Ghost Writer" is a Jamesian parable of fictional influence, 
economical and shapely, beautifully modulated, while "Zuckerman Unbound" is 
more characteristically Rothian, being freer in form and more joyously 
expressionistic in its diction. "The Anatomy Lesson" is a farce bordering on 
fantasy, closer in mode and spirit to Nathanael West than is anything else by 
Roth. With "The Prague Orgy," Roth has transcended himself, or perhaps shown 
himself and others that, being just past 50, he has scarcely begun to display 
his powers. I have read nothing else in recent American fiction that rivals 
Thomas Pynchon in "The Crying of Lot 49" and episodes like the story of Bryon 
the light bulb in the same author's "Gravity's Rainbow." "The Prague Orgy" is 
of that disturbing eminence: obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly 
reflective of a paranoid reality that has become universal. B UT the Rothian 
difference from Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon also should be emphasized. 
Roth paradoxically is still engaged in moral prophecy; he continues to be 
outraged by the outrageous - in societies, others and himself. There is in 
him nothing of West's gnostic preference for the posture of the satanic 
editor, Shrike, in "Miss Lonelyhearts," or of Pynchon's cabalistic doctrine 
of sado-anarchism. Roth's negative exuberance is not in the service of a 
negative theology, but intimates instead a nostalgia for the morality once 
engendered by the Jewish normative tradition."