BAR Loon's weapon of opportunity

[jbor]

on 25/3/03 12:54 AM, David Morris at fqmorris at yahoo.com wrote:

> I've never liked MMIV.  It is a ham-fisted morality tale.  All those people
> slaughtered at the party are a whole-sick-crew who go what they deserved.

Or a ham-fisted parody of one. The fact that in the _SL_ 'Intro' there's no
acknowledgement that the story even exists makes me wonder whether Pynchon
himself would like to disown it now too. I get the sense that there's more
than a little element of personal revenge working in the depictions of some
of the pretentious hipster crowd at the party, and it's much more caustic
towards them than towards the WSC in _V._ But I generally agree that he left
it out of the _SL_ collection because he no longer endorses the "solution"
which Siegel comes up with, nor with the way he has used the Native
American's "psychosis" as a convenient plot device. Writing and narrative
structure aren't any worse or any better than in some of the other stories.

best