Gaddis and Pynchon

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

I haven't read "A Frolic of His Own," but other works
by Gaddis I found very good. The dialogue requires much
work- like white-water rafting- but imo it's worth the 
effort. _Carpenter's Gothic_ is an exquisitely nasty
novel, tightly drawn, and filled with malice, or maybe,
just a complete absence of sincerity. 

Though unnecessary for both plot and theme of CG,
there is, paralleling each character and their interactions,
a meditation on causality and quantum mechanics,
just thrown in for? the art of it, I guess. Even the 
title is a take on the Standard Model, and it's inability
to predict the individual masses of its constituent
particles. Each must be measured experimentally
and then cobbled together into, well, a Carpenter's
Gothic- certainly no "crystal palace."

I'm sure Pynchon is a close student of Gaddis.
 

In a message dated 8/18/02 3:49:24 PM, tobylevy at juno.com writes:

<< The books that followed The Recognitions, in my most humble opinion,
varied between weak to unreadable.  Whereas the novels that followed V.
varied between amazing and absolutely incredible.

Toby

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