Tim Ware on AtD

[Chris Broderick]

David Morris requests:

I would like reviewers to let us know how they regard AtD relative to
MD.  

So I ask:

Why? I haven't read AtD, but is it somehow more deeply connected to MD than any of Pynchon's other works (for the record, I am extremely dubious of the theory that all of P's novels are part of one big novel)?  Why not compare it to Lot 49 or GR (or Moby Dick or The Da Vinci Code, for that matter)?  Or is it that MD is so bad that any comparison to it warrants disgust?  Just curious.

Then he asks:

AtD is already said by
some to be a more linear read, as was MD.  What, exactly would
motivate an "again and again" reading.

So I say:

Yeah, more linear in the sense that there is something of an overarching storyline to MD.  It begins with the framing tale of Rev. Cherrycoke's storytelling and tells the story of the friendship of 2 men and ends with their deaths.  But not linear in the sense that it leads where you expected to, and certainly full of surprises and "non-linear" digressions.

To my mind it certainly deserves a reread (And not merely because I didn't give it the attention it deserved the first time around.  I'll get to it sometime after AtD, I swear!), and for the record, I do have an ever growing list of books that I want to reread (outside of TP, next on that list is probably Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec), despite the fact that I also have an endlessly growing list of things that I haven't read that I want to.

What motivates any "again and again" reading is the sense that there are depths in the text that the reader has left unplumbed.  One may not think that MD is the greatest work of literature ever to believe that.  Obviously, if you are thinking of rereading it, you must agree.

-Chris