NPPF: P & N in NYT review of GR

[pynchonoid]

[...] For a literary standard by which we can measure
Pynchon in this book we must turn to Nabokov, the
master of fictional chess, magus of Anti-Terra, mirror
world to our own, the realist-surrealist of fabulous
skills. The operative emotion in Nabokov's work is
nostalgia, a melting sentimental remembrance of
Russian things past, which is converted into the total
intellectual possession of a compensatory (and
grander) verbal world, combining past, present and
future, ruled by its only creator, the omnipotent
author. (In its more grandiose and querulous
manifestations, such as "Ada" and the recent gray
conceit "Transparent Things," Nabokov's
self-preservative and self- celebrating elaborations
are repellently narcissistic.) 

The operative emotion behind Pynchon's literary
creations is not Nabokovia nostalgia but a fear of the
void, which Pynchon converts into the very semblance
of megalomaniac paranoia, the construction of plots
and counterplots, epic catalogues, unifying symbols
and metaphors, intense verbal energy, detailed
descriptions of natural and man-made environments,
local life styles, manic good times, college humor and
rowdiness leading to drunken and drugged orgies,
sexual perversions and reversals of role, and finally
to an obsession with the sado-masochistic conversion
of human flesh to mechanical contrivance, dead
matter.[...] 

from:
New York Times Review 

March 11, 1973 

One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious
Novels in Years
By Richard Locke 

Gravity's Rainbow By Thomas Pynchon 

at Tim Ware's site,
<http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/reviews.html>




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