The Apprenticeship of Thomas Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF THOMAS PYNCHON 
Date: April 15, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk 
Byline: By Michael Wood 
Lead: 
SLOW LEARNER 

Early Stories. By Thomas Pynchon. 193 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co. $14.95. 

IT'S always an occasion when the invisible man comes
to dinner. 

Thomas Pynchon, like J. D. Salinger, is a writer who
has been hiding away for years, and in ''Slow
Learner'' he cautiously paints himself back into the
public view. Indeed, he makes more of an appearance
than he has ever done, since the volume not only
collects five early works but offers an easygoing,
seemingly vulnerable 20-page introduction by the
vanishing author himself. Mr. Pynchon is hard on his
old faults, and at first seems to find little virtue
in what he calls his apprentice work. ''There are some
mighty tiresome passages here,'' he warns. ''I was
operating on the motto 'Make it literary,' a piece of
bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.''
''Do not,'' he adds later, ''underestimate the
shallowness of my understanding.'' Four of these
stories were written while Mr. Pynchon was a 
Text: Michael Wood, author of ''Stendhal'' and
''America in the Movies,'' is a professor of English
at the University of Exeter. student at Cornell, the
fifth in 1964, a year after the publication of his
first novel, ''V.'' 

This introduction had me worried for a while. Was this
man of such patient discretion about to crumble and
cry, to spill his soul on the confessional page? It
would be like the Scarlet Pimpernel having a
breakdown. Why was Mr. Pynchon presenting these pieces
if he didn't like them? But my worry soon subsided.
There is no confession, only the reflections of a
writer looking back over ground traveled, and a very
engaging, informal history of an odd American time,
the tag end of the 50's, too late for bop and beat,
too early for the hippies....

[...]
 
In his introduction to ''Slow Learner'' Mr. Pynchon,
who was born in 1937, says of his generation: ''There
were no more primary choices for us to make. We were
onlookers: the parade has gone by and we were already
getting everything secondhand, consumers of what the
media of the time were supplying us.'' It was the
generation of students Lionel Trilling became very
worried about; they were receiving Kafka's despair and
Conrad's anguish as commodities, dished out in
literature courses among other requirements. 

What is admirable about Mr. Pynchon is that, knowing
this, he doesn't give up or set out to become a
lumberjack, searching for fabulous, untainted writerly
experience. He writes with the resources that writers
always have, but will not always use: memory,
imagination, curiosity, access to accumulated funds of
knowledge....

THE faults of his early stories are just what Mr.
Pynchon says they are - ''bad habits, dumb theories,''
purple prose and a portentousness that crops up in all
his writing. What he doesn't talk about, although it
is a perfect answer to our question about why he is
publishing this book, is how extremely good the
stories are for all their faults, how quickly they
carry us into their scruffy, variegated, wonderfully
imagined worlds. (Another reason is that several of
these five stories, originally published in magazines
or quarterlies, have surfaced in pirated editions.) 

[...]

THOMAS PYNCHON was a cult figure in the mid-60's.
Copies of ''V'' were passed around and annotated amid
the Dylan records and the beginning of the end of the
Beatles. He was then taken up in a big way by the
academy and must be now among the most written about
of contemporary authors. I have the highest opinion of
Mr. Pynchon's work myself, but what I miss in the
figure he has become for scholarly critics, in the
difficult, meditative writer who is thought to put all
merely lucid or entertaining practitioners to shame,
is the sense of a man in a particular time and place,
and of a living author whose faults as a writer are
not to be extricated from his great virtues. This is
just what ''Slow Learner'' helps to restore. 

''What is most appealing about young folks,'' Mr.
Pynchon writes at the end of his introduction, ''is
the changes, not the still photograph of finished
character but the movie, the soul in flux.''
''Maybe,'' he continues in a slangy voice that bears
history along just because it is dated, because you
can hear the time in it, ''this small attachment to my
past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a
bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock 'n'
roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never
die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez,
keeps going on forever.'' B 

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-slowlearner.html

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com