Thank Goodness

[Tim Strzechowski]

I, too, am not a huge fan of _On The Road_, but I've always had the sense that its true "importance" as a literary work was partly due to the time period in which it was published (sorta like _The Pilgrim's Progress_, but that's a pretty severe example).  It doesn't seem nearly the
precident-breaker today as it did back in 1957, I suppose.

Monotonous, maybe.  But I personally dig the descriptions of jazz that he sprinkles throughout the book.  Simply beautiful, and dead-on!

And perhaps its that comparison with OTR that makes Pynchon's work all the more delightful: the fact that he was influenced by Kerouac, yet takes his own fiction into such "un-Kerouacian" directions (with all due respect, of course, to the article Dave Monroe posted by Pierre-Yves Petillon).



(My son just came into the room and wanted to know if Pynchon is a penguin. Too funny!)


T

From: "Toby G Levy" <tobylevy at juno.com>


> Thank Goodness the works of Pynchon are nothing like what he describes as
> "a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road
> by Jack Kerouac."
>

[ ... ]



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