Pynchon sighting

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

From: "Still Crazy After All These Years"
The New York Times
14 January 1990
By Salman Rushdie


          . . . .Other things, too, have remained constant in the Pynchonian universe, 
          where these are days of miracle and wonder, like ''Doonesbury'' written by 
          Duke instead of Garry Trudeau, and the paranoia runs high because behind 
          the heavy scenes and bad trips and Karmic Adjustments move the shadowy 
          invisible forces, the true Masters of the Universe, ''the unrelenting forces 
          that leaned ever after . . . into Time's wind, impassive in pursuit, usually 
          gaining, the faceless predators . . . [who] had simply persisted, 
          stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain 
          or accommodate, following through pools of night where nothing else moved 
          wrongs forgotten by all but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to 
          refuse to be bought off for any but the full price, which they had never named.''

          That's what we're up against, folks, and what Mr. Pynchon used to set against 
          it in the old days was entropy, seen as a slow, debauched, never-ending party, 
          a perpetual coming-down, shapeless and meaningless and therefore unshaped 
          and uncontrolled: freedom is chaos, he told us, but so is destruction, and that's 
          the high wire, walk it if you can. And now here we are in ''Vineland,'' and the 
          entropy's still flowing, but there's something new to report, some faint possibility 
          of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace. Thomas Pynchon, 
          like Paul Simon's girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human Trampoline, 
          is bouncing into Graceland.

Grace is the difference between pre- and post-GR Pynchon.