Newsday review of AtD

[David Morris]

No spoiler here.
This line from the review repeats the "round versus flat" conversation
we've had here about Pynchon, but in slightly different terms.  Still,
the idea of Pynchon's character's being symbols rather that people is
the issue at hand:

"his fiction is shaped at its deepest levels by the basic concepts of
these fields[information theory, mathematical physics, cosmology],
which are, for Pynchon, absolutely essential to understanding the
history and inner logic of the way we live now. All of this places
considerable demands upon the attention of a reader - but even more,
perhaps, on the lives of his characters, who constantly threaten to
turn into allegorical emblems or algebraic cyphers."

The review is very positive, but I think he's hit the character
issue's nail on the head (and he thinks that this should be obvious to
anyone who's read GR).

David Morris

On 11/17/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Scott McLemee's review for Newsday is available
>
> http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bkcov4977785nov19,0,7633389.story?coll=ny-bookreview-headlines