AtD reviewed by Laura Miller at Salon

[Monte Davis]

> AtD reviewed by Laura Miller at Salon
 
> http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/11/21/pynchon/index_np.html

Not only does it have this 

"At the heart of all this is a romantic delusion, namely a keen nostalgia
for the heyday of 1960s counterculture..."

See the "Boomer Myopia" thread. Does Miller have a clue that it was at least
as much bebop and Beats that set Pynchon's compass as Berkeley and the
Byrds? That he was alive and alert during the 1960s is clear; that he
idealizes or embodies them can be asserted only by a very careless reader.


And in support of her argument that writers who have learned from Pynchon
now surpass him, we get this:

"Or, take a writer like Neal Stephenson, whose grasp of the systems that
fascinate Pynchon -- science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology --
is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into
how those systems work than Pynchon offers here."

I enjoyed Stephenson's Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and anticipated that I'd
really like his Baroque Cycle -- in large part because it so clearly aimed
at a Pynchonian historical reach. But I bailed out early in the second
volume because my experience was 180 degrees away from Miller's on all four
counts.