Pynchon mention

[Doug Millison]

[...] we are witnessing the later stages of a long warfare between what I
think of as ascetic realism-a belief in the artistic and ethical primacy of
the understated treatment of the here and now-and something we might call,
for want of an official term, "maximalism," a tendency toward expansive,
centrifugal narrative that aspires to embrace the complexity of
contemporary life. If we go back a quarter-century, to the mid-1970s, we
can see the polarity alive and well, represented, on the one hand, by
Raymond Carver's influential short-story collection Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please? (1976) and, on the other, by Thomas Pynchon's limit-busting
novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973).

In these works, the conflict between worldviews is revealed at the level of
the sentence. The aesthetics of a Carver and a Pynchon could not be more
different. Carver's writing registers, by way of a harshly pruned-back
affect, the injurious impact of the world on the susceptible psyche.
Pynchon's prose opens itself to the overwhelmingness of life, registering
detail, exploring myriad connections (often in a playful manner), and
communicating a sense of open-endedness that is always outrunning the
perceptions of the moment. [...] There are many ways to write the story of
the gradual triumph of the maximalist approach. But a catalytic moment
surely was the publication in 1973 of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the
novel that ambitiously combined antic black comedy, a compellingly paranoid
historical vision, and a sensibility saturated in the ethos of the
then-counterculture. To be sure, that big book's arrival was preceded by
the publication in 1953 of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and
in 1955 of William Gaddis's he Recognitions. And in their very different
ways, more elaborate stylists such as John Updike and John Cheever, along
with Roth and Bellow, were also staking an ambitious claim to charting our
turbulent social and spiritual landscape. Still, Pynchon's novel remains,
more than any other work, the ur-text for more contemporary makers of
fiction; the book exerts its influence even on those who have never read
it. [...] Gloriously elliptical, digressive, allowing his clauses to loosen
and drift before drawing tight around noun and verb, Pynchon is, by design
or not, making a revolutionary turn against the Hemingway mode. Keep in
mind, too, that Pynchon was writing before the advent of our polymorphous
electronic culture. His contribution-one of many-was to patent a style, an
approach that could later be adapted to rendering the strange
interdependencies of a world liberated from its provincial boundedness. He
modeled a swoop of mind, a way of combining precision with puckishness, a
kind of rolling agglomeration that would prove formative for the generation
now coming into its own. [...]


....more about Pynchon and today's novelists in:
http://wwics.si.edu/outreach/wq/WQSELECT/BIRKERTS.HTM

The Struggle for the Soul of the Sentence
by Sven Birkerts
The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2001