NE Ohio - AtD Party!

[Monte Davis]

> The only person I know personally who's read it is my freshman 
> year roommate (and she lives in CA).  Thus the p-list...

Much as some reviewers' casual references to a Pynchon "cult" may pain us,
I see no reason to think our numbers are going to explode, or that the many
fine younger writers influenced by Pynchon add up to a new mainstream.
There's uncomfortable truth in this bit from Gerald Howard's fine 2005
essay:

"I do worry, though, that Gravity's Rainbow may be turning into an
undervisited monument. In a poll of sixteen assistants and assistant editors
under the age of thirty at my publishing company, a marvelously well-read
group, I discovered that only two of them had read the book and only five
had read any books at all by Pynchon. The comments from those who had read
Pynchon suggested that they found him slow going stylistically and that his
concerns were in general alien and irrelevant to them. This makes sense.
Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the
adversary culture that opposed them, whereas these young people came of age
after the fall of communism, in a time when technology is viewed as the
royal road to imaginative and personal freedom. In a very real sense, then,
Gravity's Rainbow is turning historical-an inevitable fate."


 http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html