Your Arm's Too Short to Fight with Thomas Pynchon

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I agree (as would most, but by no means all) that GR is TRP's outstanding masterpiece.  Part of the value of COL49 is that it's TRP's most accessible work, by virtue of its length and its relatively (for Pynchon) straightforward style.  But like all TRP's works, COL49 has lots of great sequences and passages that make it worth reading in and of itself.

Laura (sorry for the overuse of acronyms -- I'm a lazy typist)

-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Sent: Apr 30, 2008 12:50 PM
>To: kelber at mindspring.com
>Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Your Arm's Too Short to Fight with Thomas Pynchon
>
>I never meant dismissal.  GR is probably my favorite novel.  Still
>categorizing genre(s) it embodies is a form of analysis and places it
>in historical context.
>
>That said, I think COL40 was a sort of dry run of GR, and much less successful.
>
>David Morris
>
>On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 11:37 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> A friend of mine once outraged me by dismissing my idol Dostoyevsky as a cheap crime writer.  You can reduce D or TRP to the pulp elements of their novels, but there's little for the reader to gain by doing so.
>>
>> Laura