Challenge post

[David Morris]

On 10/5/07, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > AtD has been out less than a year; I'm sure comment on GR circa 1974 was just as baffling to many.

Well, from this NYT review in '73, it seems to have been very well
received, and not all that baffling.  I don't believe ATD is so
difficult that it's not yet fully appreciated.  And there is a very
obvious reason why Pynchon's first three works are the ones critics
have focused favorably upon...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html

Pynchon's new book is thus an event--it breaks seven years of silence
and allays the fear that he might never go beyond his early success.
"Gravity's Rainbow" is longer, darker and more difficult than his
first two books; in fact it is the longest, most difficult and most
ambitious novel to appear here since Nabokov's "Ada" four years ago;
its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and
Faulkner. Immersing himself in "the destructive element" and exploring
paranoia, entropy and the love of death as primary forces in the
history of our time, Pynchon establishes his imaginative continuity
with the great modernist writers of the early years of this century.
"Gravity's Rainbow" is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate,
silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical,
poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached
and blasted.