First ATD hatchet job

[Carvill John]

Incredibly snide (and highly spoilerish) review of ATD. Hinges on calling 
Pynchon just a conpiler of lists. Well, if they're lists like the one 
detailing the detritus on Slothrop's desk, compile away Mr P.

First two thirds of the first page can probably be read without encountering 
a spoiler, in the plot sense.

Scroll down for some (imo) non-spoilerish extracts:

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"After reading "Against the Day" (Penguin Press, 1,085 pages, $35), however, 
it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Pynchon's difficulty is really 
just the costume worn by his simplicity. The complexity of his novels, and 
of this eagerly awaited sixth novel in particular, is really a matter of 
simple multiplicity: They are stuffed to bursting with oddities, so that the 
reader moves through them at the halting pace of a rubbernecker.
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For the writer who lives by the list must die by the list, and Mr. Pynchon, 
in pushing the form to its limits and beyond, demonstrates what a list-like 
novel cannot do. Multiplicity, it turns out, is not the same thing as 
complexity: Complexity requires syntax, and syntax is just what the maker of 
lists must forswear. Human meanings — psychological, social, spiritual — 
require other kinds of structure than the infinitely repeated "and" of the 
shaggy-dog story. That is why Mr. Pynchon's meanings, in "Against the Day" 
as in his better books, are finally inhuman, Manichean, utopian, and 
dystopian. He believes in conspiracies, not histories, including the 
individual histories that the novel was invented to tell.
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In fact, however, his attitude towards violence is childishly sentimental, 
and ruthless in a way only possible to a writer whose imagination has never 
dwelt among actual human beings."

Reads, to me, like a classic Vinelandish case of the reviewer being 
unimpressed with Pynchon's pinko commie rat political views.

JC

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