Pynchon's endings

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              Daniel Harper:
              Would most of you agree that Rainbow is the best 
              of the best? As I said before, I'm intentionally saving 
              it for last for that very reason. 

I'm leaning in the general direction of Against the Day, it has
such a wonderful variety of authorial voices, so many lovely
turns of phrase and the glimmerings of real characters inside 
the cartoons. Gravity's Rainbow makes for an especially 
difficult first reading on account of a lot of New Wavish 
cutting and cross-cutting, kinda hard to follow at times. 
Mason & Dixon has great beauty beside some longuers 
and disruptive anachronism. I've read V. about three times 
now, disliking it just as much each time. Maybe Against the 
Day will change all that. Every time I read Vineland, I love it all 
the more, and yes, on a certain level I do like it more than 
Gravity's Rainbow, on certain levels (recognizable human 
behaviors, likeable characters, happy endings [compacting 
acres of plot into a brief epilog]) it is a better book. As for 
The Crying of Lot 49, it might be a failure as far as the 
author is concerned, but as a crystallization of Pynchon's 
Bi-Located, Multi-Purposed, MultiLingual Be-Bop Zeitgeist, 
it's a shard from the vessel of creation.

But nothing Pynchon has written affected me like the last 
two pages of Against the Day.