Devil's advocate in Slate comments

[geeaysun]

"but that he is, technically, not a very good
writer..."

that phrase doesn't agree with me much.  since when
does anything have to be "technically" sound to attain
artistic merit?  it's not that difficult, really, to
be a sound writer, "technically" speaking.  but i
think that's hardly the point considering the scope of
the work in discussion.

and in terms of style, i like to think that TRP's
approach mirrors/complements, extraordinarily well,
the nature of his dense, complex,
not-easily-summarized, (enter your own, probably
better descriptor) subject matter.



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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