Locke's review redux

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

This 1973 review of _Gravity's Rainbow_ has been linked to and quoted from
here often, but in light of the PFPF, it's worth another look.

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

To wit:

"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."

--Richard Locke, NYT

And this, which methinks could drive an argument ...

"In Pynchon's world there is almost no trust, no human nurture, no mutual
support, no family life. In "Gravity's Rainbow" the one romantic love affair
is sentimental and doomed as the war ends, and the others are instances of
either heterosexual or homosexual lust. This is most unlike Nabokov at his
best, when he allows his feelings for people. family and sexual love to
stand revealed at the center of his dextrous verbal work. Pynchon doesn't
create characters so much as mechanical men to whom a manic comic impulse or
a vague free-floating anguish can attach itself, often in brilliant streams
of consciousness."

etb