"exhausted by Mark Z Danielewski's dense and overly-complicated tome"

[pynchonoid]

As a PrivateFirstClass in the US Army regularly
patrolling the DMZ (Korea) in war game maneuvers, it
was the voice that got me first back in that summer of
'73 - the voice of doom that begins GR, sounded a
chord in this draftee,  the smart-ass black humor, the
voice of late 20th century America, to my ear. Totally
hooked by the time I got to the Zone, it made a
certain kind of sense to me, living as I did, a
non-volunteer soldier in an occupying Army 6 clicks
south of heavily-armored Peace Treaty Village at
Panmunjom.   Went on to read the rest, V., The Crying
of Lot 49, and Vineland, but only in the past dozen
years did I get back to the kind of close reading I
had done at school and returned to Pynchon's novels,
and what fun it has been.

GR's a difficult novel for some people to get into,
obviously - I think that has as much to do with the
shifting narrators as anything else, it's confusing. 
But the first time through, that didn't bother me at
all, the text was considerably less confusing than the
voices and texts I had to deal with as a
PrivateFirstClass 24/7, and at least it was there on
the page where I could go over it at leisure and try
to sort things out, or not, and there's a lot to be
said about just kicking back and letting Pynchon take
you for a ride, pure poetry so many of those lines.

FYI, I listened to the unabridged Mason & Dixon audio
book when it came out, and to my ear, that text read
aloud struck me as immensely entertaining, not the
same experience as GR read aloud, but well worth the
time for its own delights.   
 


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