Good morning, fellow self-flagellaters

[Paul Mackin]

Here's another review of that 1973 nervous breakdown book . . . .





"It's also true -- it may be cliché by now, but there's no getting  
around it -- that this was a time of deep paranoia in this country  
from which we show little evidence of recovering. The incredible  
damage that Watergate did to the presidency and to popular confidence  
in governmental institutions; the loss of Vietnam and the concomitant  
"sense that the era of Western domination [was] over"; the collapse  
of the economy and the coming of the OPEC-induced gas lines, still  
further evidence of the decline of the West -- all of this combined  
to produce a mood of deep self-doubt, a belief that someone out there  
was trying to "get" us.

The repercussions of all this are still with us. Probably not many  
people read Fear of Flying anymore, and it would be amazing if  
Gravity's Rainbow is now read anywhere outside of graduate schools or  
especially self-flagellating book clubs, but the sexual revolution of  
which Erica Jong's novel was emblematic continues apace, with ever  
more distressing ramifications, and the paranoia that is at the heart  
of Thomas Pynchon's brilliant and unreadable novel is still a central  
characteristic of American culture and politics."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/ 
AR2006042701958.html?sub=AR

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