AtD reviewed by Laura Miller at Salon

[Paul Mackin]

On Nov 21, 2006, at 9:44 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

>
>> 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.

Monte's point about Pynchon's nostalgia for working-man  
philosophizing being pre-sixties is completely valid.

Pre-sixties  by about 50 years.

But  give Laura Miller  some credit. She only mentioned the  sixties  
once. It wasn't a big  deal.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
How did Stphenson get lumped in with the other two writers.