Devil's advocate in Slate comments

[Erik Roberts]

Mason & Dixon is an extremely well shod book, and that's why it was such
a pleasant surprise.  V and G.R. were written with shoddy fluency but
he's different now.  Mason & Dixon has tons of gorgeous passages, none
of them stumbled upon or lucked into.  Have you read Science Fiction?
There's no serious comparison.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Ya Sam
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 4:41 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Devil's advocate in Slate comments



Subject: Pynchon is a bad writer
From: thetwomacduff
Date: Jul 20 2006 3:52PM

Many of the replies to danielmartinx have missed his main point, which
was 
not that the university crowd have abandoned him, but that he is, 
technically, not a very good writer; that his prose is clotted and
poorly 
constructed, and that the praise he has received has been for the
supposed 
"ideas" content, not for the style, which is often excused, but seldom 
praised.

Of course, every now and then, he pulls off a beautiful passage, viz.,
the 
opening of Gravity's Rainbow, but he isn't able to consistently write 
readable prose, or even construct moderately well-crafted sentences.

The stuff of Pynchon's Books is, mostly, science fiction, but his
technique 
is to swathe that stuff in a style that is self-consciously post-modern,

and, as he has gone on and on, it is the style that has brought him his
fans 
- and yes, I would agree, he has many, and that many are members or 
hangers-on of the "university crowd." But he's an appallingly slipshod 
writer, and, in my opinion, not a very clear thinker.

If you want to read the book that Gravity's Rainbow aspired to be, read
Neal 
Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, for it has many of the same concerns, it
covers 
the same period and theatre of operations, and it is a much better
crafted 
book.

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