A Kakutaniesque Turn by Kakutani

[Joe Allonby]

This ninny obviously doesn't get it. She criticises Pynchon for having
dozens of characters with odd names and very short appearances in a long
novel. Uuuhhhh....

On 11/20/06, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Very harsh review of ATD for NYT. Spoiler-free excerpts follow:
>
> A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon
>
> By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
>
> "Thomas Pynchon's new novel, "Against the Day," reads like the sort of
> imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this
> author's might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated
> jigsaw
> puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical
> without
> being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."
>
>
> "For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon's earlier work tended
> to
> be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human
> connection,
> soulfulness or redemption. That began to change with his 1990 novel
> "Vineland," which evinced a new interest in an individual's relationship
> to
> family, and with "Mason & Dixon," which made its heroes' longings and
> dreams
> as palpable as their comic high jinks.
>
> Although this impulse can be discerned in "Against the Day," it's blunted
> and stillborn."
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
>
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