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[Monte Davis]

> It really must have been something to've read V. and Lot 49, 
> waited impatiently for seven years, and  
> then be hit over the head with that orange monster.

Not that dramatic. It was probably summer 1963 (my brother 17, I 13) when he
had the Bantam pb of V, which he liked but wasn't blown away by. I was a
precocious and fast reader, but if memory serves I bounced off it the first
try and didn't get around to finishing it for a year or two. 

By the time a friend pushed Crying of Lot 49 into my hands, my brother was
probably more focused on college graduation and impending Vietnam (he'd had
a NROTC scholarship, which had seemed a better idea in 1963 than it did four
years later). I loved CoL49, and it sent me back to a thorough re-reading of
V -- but about the same time I was enthralled by Giles Goat-Boy and then The
Sot-Weed Factor, and would certainly have said Barth was my main man. Over
the next few years The Magic Mountain, Ada, the Commedia and above all
Ulysses successively became my Book-That's-A-World.

The opening of the Locke review isn't far off what I would have said as of
1972. To the extent I was developing a personal literary pantheon, I'd have
grouped Pynchon with the Heller of Catch-22, also with Barth for the
interest in history -- definitely a notch or three below Joyce and Nabokov
as a world- and word-builder. I certainly didn't think of P. as _sui
generis_, rather "in the pack" of interesting and ambitious contemporaries.
I don't recall wondering impatiently "what's he up to now?" Then a screaming
came across the sky.

As I said a few months ago, the reader's age is an inseparable part of a
book's impact -- none of us can quite separate questions of quality and
"importance" from who we were, and what we were ready to learn, when we read
it. Mason & Dixon seems to me an even more extraordinary book than GR,
especially in its handling of narrative time and in that quintessentiially
Pynchonian fluidity of of narrative voice, sliding in and of out of the
characters' heads, in and out of mine. But it didn't roll over and pummel
and reshape the 47-year-old me the way Ulysses did at 21 or GR at 23, and --
with mixed feelings -- I wonder if anything could.