Steven Shaviro Reviews ATD, or Steven Shaviro Praises ATD

[jentery sayers!]

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=544

Some hightlights:

You will gather that I am utterly unable to comprehend the most frequent 
comment people have made about /Against the Day/: that it is impossible 
to read, that its size is just too imposing, that forcing yourself to go 
through it is a chore, etc. etc. To the contrary: for me, reading it was 
an extraordinary pleasure, an epicurean delight. Pynchon’s supple and 
sinuous prose is something I have to savor, reading slowly and 
carefully, letting my mind wander in the labyrinths of clauses and 
associations, in the twists and turns and continual modulations of tone, 
from the crassly comic, to the urgent, to the elegiac. There may well be 
other writers who are more profound than Pynchon; but there no other 
living writer of the English language whose /sentences/ I enjoy anywhere 
near as much as I do Pynchon’s.

...

I do not agree with the tendency of so many readers to fetishize 
/Gravity’s Rainbow/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN//dhalgrenstevensh> as Pynchon’s 
one great book, and to ignore, or dismiss as uninteresting and 
second-rate, all three of the novels he has written and published since. 
To my mind, /Mason & Dixon/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312423209/dhalgrenstevensh>, 
and now /Against the Day/, both of which are longer than /Gravity’s 
Rainbow/, are both every bit as wonderful — and indeed as timely, or as 
untimely — as that earlier book — even if they do not overtly display 
all those kewl proto-cyberpunk dynamics.

Enjoy,
Jentery