Gaddis and Pynchon

[MalignD at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/20/02 1:14:38 PM, millison at online-journalist.com 
writes:<< ... but those of us who rank Pynchon highly are not alone. >>

I rank Pynchon highly also.  To say, however, that "no one is even close," is 
an admission of a closed or defective critical mind.  In your case, the 
problem is that you don't read very much, so far as is evidenced by what you 
post here.  In his case, I don't know.  Autism, perhaps. 

Pynchon has written one inarguably great book:  Gravity's Rainbow.  And he 
can and surely will ride it through time.  But, viewed objectively, he seems 
to have peaked early, not unlike Ken Kesey.  We all love Kesey, but who took 
pleasure in seeing him, thirty years later, dressed in tie-dye, babbling like 
a man from the land that time forgot?  

M&D is certainly far better than any of Kesey's later work, but Pynchon, to 
those who aren't scraping to touch the hem of his garment, displays a similar 
problem.  Some fifteen or so years passed after GR before he produced, 
disappointingly, Vineland.  Another what:  eight?--until M&D, a 
mock-historical novel, a post-modern trope done arguably as well by John 
Barth in the early/mid sixties.  It's not that it's not without it's moments, 
but what a disappointment.  It's like Bob Dylan making an album of Stephen 
Foster songs.

GR is a miraculous book and I can't praise it highly enough.  It was both 
timely and timeless.  But M&D?  The world has turned many many times between 
these novels and Pynchon, it would seem, has fallen out of touch.  M&D is 
fine and all but irrelevant; given its author, it's gravely disappointing.  
He may as well have re-written Babbitt or The Sun Also Rises.  I don't know 
any other way to say it.  Who does he speak to, other than his acolytes?  

M&D (let alone Vineland) gives evidence to a solid intelligence, but one 
whose time has passed.  The craft is there, for the most part.  But to what 
end?  M&D is the sort of project a writing history professor might have 
written, Jay Parini, perhaps.  Not Pynchon.