From today's San Francisco Chronicle

[Eulenspiegel7646 at aol.com]

Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' 

by David Kipen

Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to reward it. 
So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's 
foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" just happens to 
be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around, the case might yet remain 
something shy of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions for a 
skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of 
all to nail down, "Why?" Answers to the first two boil down to "You name it" 
and "Who do you think?" But trying to explain why a piece of writing wipes 
the floor with just about anything else published this year is, necessarily, 
trickier. Pynchon's foreword expertly re-creates the atmosphere surrounding 
the composition and reception of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," but any gifted 
literary historian might have managed that. He articulates an unsentimental 
humanism relevant to developing events, but an uncommonly perceptive 
political essayist might have done the same. Where Pynchon doesn't just 
outpace but laps the rest of the field is in his incomparably supple style. 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/03/DD302378

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