authors influenced by Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

--- Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net> wrote:

> I don't love everything DFW publishes, but I think
> those of you who  
> don't like his work are just missing the boat.  Many
> of the charges  
> leveled at Wallace -- of long, mazey sentences, of
> purposeful  
> opaqueness, of mechanical characters and pointlessly
> long and wordy  
> novels -- are bulls-eye Pynchonian.

I haven't read Wallace yet (gasp!) either. I've picked
his books up countless times in bookstores and put
them back down, a "one of these days" thing.  

I wonder if there's a residue of what we enjoy so much
as "Pynchonian" that can't be described in terms of
sentence structure and choice of setting.  Certainly
the treatment of paranoia and control is there, as
fundamentals of modern (or po-mo) existence, in a way
that I don't know  if any other author really can
match.  

Compared to some of these books "heavily influenced by
Pynchon" a novel like Vineland may not look terribly
"Pynchonian", yet, to my mind, it contains the essence
of what makes Pynchon a great novelist.



> 
> I loved INFINITE JEST, and I'm not afraid to say it
> here among you.
> 
> But, of course, I've read some stuff here in the
> last week about  
> people not much liking GRAVITY'S RAINBOW or MASON &
> DIXON too.
> 
> Huh?!?
> 
> -- Will

Yes, hard to understand how a Pynchon fan could not
enjoy Mason & Dixon - or Vineland - but there's no
accounting for taste and no use arguing about it.
Sentence for sentence, paragraph to paragraph, those
novels evoke everything I like about Pynchon's work,
and I think that was obvious to most open-minded
readers when we read those novels closely in this
forum.



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