Well I just reread Vineland and the news is still bad...

[Chris Broderick]

Robin sez:

I think when TRP lightened up, the motives of the characters 
in his novels became more plausible.

So I sez:

That I can agree with.  And I must admit that I have a very uneasy relationship with some of the sillier aspects of Pynchon's work.  On the one hand, it's a big part of what appeals to me about his writing.  He has become a lot more comfortable engaging in lo-jinx in his later works, sometimes to great laffs (Vato & Blood's theme song!).  But sometimes (as in the noir center) to groans & head slapping.  No accounting for taste, I know.  Especially when it comes to comedy.

But I agree he has become a more humane writer since GR.  V, COL49 & GR focus on individuals, mostly young people with no families or kids.  VL, M&D and AtD are about families, and relations between generations.  Such issues pop up in his earlier works, but not to the extent that they are present in the later stuff.

Then Robin sez:

The kind of existential dread that 
pervades GR doesn't really return in the later books, at least
to not the same degree. 

So I sez:

And indeed that is what I miss.  There is something in the narrative voice of some passages of GR that is so driven and feverish that it's hard not to imagine the author (whatever the hell he looks like) breaking out in a sweat as he meticulously scrawls on quadrille paper.  If asked to describe the book, I often bring up the passage in the beginning where Prentice imagines something to the effect of, "but what if the rocket were to land directly at the top of your skull?"  That's what's missing from his later works.  But then again, everyone gets older, most grow up.

Still, that fever has been missing from his later works, and IMHO, it is missed.  It's not to say that there are not many riches & wonders to be gleaned, but I can't help but miss that near insanity.  Oh well.  Melville may not have written Moby Dick II (Ahab Jr.'s Revenge!), but The Confidence Man is still an amazing book.

Chris Broderick
www.myspace.com/christophermichaelbroderick
 
"Silence is so accurate."
-Mark Rothko



 
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