TNYROB AtD Review

[Sterling Clover]

A much sharper review than most, yes. I tended to read melancholy  
where sante reads a search for hope though, found the title much less  
multifaceted, and it seems he almost steers too clear of trying to  
draw out the thematic underpinnings out of fear of reductionism.  
Really liked the treatments of Basnight and Latewood. Found this  
particularly insightful:

"Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the  
point where you'd almost want to find another word for the sort of  
thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way  
a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply  
linear fashion."

Reminded me of my own thoughts on bakhtin and novelization coming off  
ATD and the genric hop-scotching pynchon seems to drown himself in.  
if the height of bakhtin's modern novel is voices speaking through  
and illuminating one another, pynchon maybe as those voices passing  
through one another, grown so carnivorous that they pull away again  
-- modern reality as an over-determined equation, multiple rational  
paths but each exclusive of the next, and at times even itself.  
bakhtin's dream was a sort of liberal ideal of finding the harmonies  
and balances of each viewpoint, the bourgeois standpoint as able to  
alienate itself from the totality and hence imagine it, then this too  
to be transcended and sublimated again in the secret harmonics of  
cacophony. But the unstated fear always hovering just out of camera,  
eyes refusing to focus on its incongruous form -- what if the pieces  
can't be made to fit? Or what if they did, until one day... they just  
stopped?

Splitting an image like icelandic spar right, every image refusing to  
match up with its pair? Maybe not so much a dream of possibility on  
the part of pynchon as also a horror trope -- c.f. stories of  
degenerated clones, king's pet semetary, even the psychiatric  
disorder in the new Powers -- the man who breaks into your house,  
rearranges your furniture, and leaves it *exactly the same*.

Of course my own fear is that I'm just rewriting pomo 101 here.

--Sterl