Inherent Vice review New York Magazine

[tbeshear]

I was too young to have experienced much hippiedom myself, but I have 
relatives and friends who were, and talking about paranoia then was quite 
common.

Sam Anderson annoyed me a week ago with is early review of Vollmann's 
Imperial -- there was a widely circulated dismissive paragraph about the 
book -- it was quite funny, but it indicated to me that Anderson's a smug 
little critic who likes the sound of his own writer's voice much more than 
he likes to engage with something different and difficult.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 4:32 AM
Subject: RE: Inherent Vice review New York Magazine


>
> Robin:
>
>> Sam Anderson is quite illuminating and articulate in his screed [...]
>> I may not agree with Sam Anderson but I defend the right of Mr.
>> Anderson to express his dislikes in such a coherent fashion.
>
> Yeah, at least he's honest about hating Pynchon, as opposed to those 
> critics
> who try to conceal their hatred under supposedly neutral arguments (James
> Wood comes to mind). Nevertheless, I was puzzled by this bit in Sam 
> Anderson's
> review:
>
>> Pynchon has always been a cartoonist: He specializes in simplification,
>> exaggeration, and brightly colored types. This means that, paradoxically,
>> his wildest invention occurs right at the edge of cliché. He may have 
>> finally
>> fallen over that edge. His types, after 45 years, have themselves become 
>> types.
>> The characters in Inherent Vice are not only paranoid, they walk around 
>> constantly
>> talking about their paranoia.
>
> That final sentence: As though Pynchon's paranoid characters talking about 
> their
> paranoia represents some sort of new, clichéd direction in Pynchon's late 
> work.
> But they have been doing it all along, especially in Lot 49 and GR! In 
> fact, this
> self-consciousness was one of the NEW things about Pynchon's take on 
> paranoia
> back in the sixties. World literature before Pynchon is crammed with 
> paranoid
> characters - Dostoevsky's Underground Man, for instance, or the governess 
> in
> Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw'. Only those characters don't really 
> know
> that they're paranoid; that's up to the reader to discover. Whereas 
> Pynchon's
> characters have been aware of their paranoia all along, and have spoken of 
> it
> at great length, cf. Oedipa's musings about the four different 
> alternatives
> she faces toward the end of Lot 49, or Pig's theories of We-systems, 
> They-systems,
> and creative paranoia in GR.
>
> Tore
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