Hitting Below the Mason -Dixon Line

[John Doe]

I don't have the time or energy at the moment to raise
poignant objections to the bulk of 'Harvey''s charges,
but I will point out the most basic error of
appraisal: hey, dude; Stephen King has written many
super-fat books ( a few are MUCH longer than anything
TRP has put out ), but you don't see critics
reflexively equating their sheer bulk with literary
value, and as far as the critics and profs. I've heard
goes, most seem to agree Lot 49 is "better" than
Vineland...so the Book-Mass criteria is just not
tenable.



--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The recently issued Mason & Dixon, like all Thomas
> Pynchon novels, is a load of crap. He has nothing to
> say and often says it clumsily. His sense of humor
> is
> lame and sophomoric. He writes to exhibit what he
> thinks is his erudition and cleverness, but is a
> boring clod. Yet Pynchon's among the most highly
> praised writers of our time by academics and other
> literary pundits. How can this be? Why do people
> rave
> about this guy's sodden, turgid books?
> 
> Well, for one thing, he writes long novels. Critics
> often equate lengthy with profound. Like the first
> Pulitzer Prize in music granted to a jazz-related
> person went to Wynton Marsalis for a three-hour long
> piece that a friend of mine saw people walk out on.
> The recording hasn't even been released yet. In any
> case, Marsalis is an imitative, reactionary composer
> and improviser. To give him the first jazz-related
> Pulitzer is a slap in the face to great composers,
> living and dead, including Duke Ellington,
> Thelonious
> Monk, Tadd Dameron, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, and
> Herbie Hancock. It's comparable to choosing the
> trivial, sentimental, manipulative, pseudo-profound
> Forrest Gump as best film of the year. The people
> who
> vote for these awards are middlebrows with delusions
> of grandeur. Think I'm kidding? James Joyce didn't
> get
> a Nobel Prize, but Pearl Buck did.
> 
> Anyway, the longer Pynchon's novels are, the better
> critics like them. The 887-page Gravity's Rainbow
> has
> gotten the most praise, followed by V. at 463 pages,
> Vineland at 385 pages, and the slim The Crying of
> Lot
> 49 at 138 pages. Quite possibly, Mason & Dixon
> (Henry
> Holt, $27.50 hard) at a hefty 773 pages, will
> supplant
> V. in second place.
> 
> Another reason academics are so crazy for Pynchon is
> that his work contains so much obscure information,
> like about World War II weapons technology. (Pynchon
> had a background in science, worked for Boeing prior
> to making it as a novelist and contributed a piece
> to
> the December 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety.) He
> makes
> a lot of references to pop culture, which endears
> him
> to readers who believe that even though he's got an
> immense store of knowledge, he's no stuffed shirt.
> Like, doesn't he write about rock & roll? He throws
> so
> much shit into his novels that people don't know
> what
> he's trying to do. But they love to speculate.
> Academics are crazy about interpreting his work. To
> accommodate all the factual data he wants to stick
> into his novels he devises labyrinthine plots
> involving conspiracies. This fires up university
> teachers; they get a huge kick out of referring to
> the
> "paranoia" in his writing. Pynchon hands them plenty
> to write about, a chance to publish so they don't
> have
> to perish.
> 
> Many commentators mistakenly refer to Pynchon as an
> avant garde-ist. Among others who have anticipated
> his
> work are Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Terry
> Southern, and Joseph Heller. Burroughs, Kerouac, and
> Southern employed plays, poems, and song lyrics in
> their work before Pynchon, and other novelists did
> it
> far before all of them. The technique of blending
> poems, playlets, and other forms with straight-ahead
> prose fiction was employed by Russian experimenters
> in
> the early part of the century and labeled
> "ornamentalism." Joyce also blended forms. Pynchon's
> combining fact and fantasy isn't anything new, and
> he
> didn't invent absurdism, which he sometimes uses.
> He's
> synthesized some relatively modern styles and
> techniques that readers of conventional fiction
> don't
> often run across, so they give him credit for being
> more far-out and original than he really is. Pynchon
> uses long, complex sentences, but they aren't
> innovative grammatically or syntactically. He didn't
> invent the encyclopedic novel either. Ulysses, for
> example, was published over 40 years before V.
> 
> The way Pynchon jams information into his books
> doesn't have much purpose, other than to attempt to
> dazzle readers. Joyce, on the other hand, uses his
> immense knowledge far more subtly in the process of
> creating symbols. Merely citing a bunch of product
> names like Stacey Adams shoes and Count Chocula, as
> Pynchon does, isn't a great feat, nor is his giving
> cutesy names to people and places like Benny Profane
> and the Bohdi Dharma Pizza Parlor. Anyone can just
> sit
> around for 10 years and read, like Pynchon; his
> reclusiveness has aided in building his reputation,
> and then write a novel filled with the factual
> information picked up.
> 
> In Mason & Dixon Pynchon employs his old gimmicks
> and
> uses one that's new to him, though not to
> 20th-century
> novelists: He uses deliberately archaic prose, as
> Charles Portis did more skillfully and humorously in
> True Grit. The book's a fictionalized biography of
> British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,
> who drew their famous line between Pennsylvania and
> Maryland in the 18th century. According to a blurb,
> it's supposed to be "...a grand tour of the
> Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first
> journey together to the Cape of Good Hope to
> pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into
> the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later
> lives." Along the way they meet Benjamin Franklin,
> George Washington, a Chinese Feng Shui master, a
> talking dog, and a robot duck. Feh! If Pynchon
> deserves any prize it's for being the world's most
> overrated trivia buff. He's the literary equivalent
> of
> the Piltdown Man.
> 
> But I ain't kidding myself about convincing readers
> that Pynchon has no clothes, old or new. More than
> likely his fans will believe jealousy inspired me to
> write this article. After all, didn't Mason & Dixon
> get a great review in Time? Doesn't your English
> teacher think he's fabulous? Yeah, yeah.
> 
> But just remember, literary fashions change. One day
> people will realize that Pynchon has feet of clay.
> And
> then they'll think, "Ol' Harv saw through him years
> ago. He knew what was happening all along!"
> 
> "Yes he did!" - Harvey Pekar
> 
>
http://rachel.auschron.com/issues/vol16/issue41/books.pynchon.html
> 
> 
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