MICHIKO KAKUTANI

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Joe Allonby<joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> She's just no fun.

She's kinda old school in the Chicago Style sense of demanding a
certain rhetorical contract. Pynchon's project is to jab Modernist
fiction to the ropes of paranoid Wastings for God. Then the Homer
Simpson chorus sings, Doh!

>From her POV

1. All this talk about listening to OBA voice is part of the ploy.
Pynchon's persona is an affront on narrative voice.  The reader,
Pynchon's prose says, can not get at a distinct voice. Sure, we know
his style; we can figure that voice must be smart, educated (not the
same as smart), but is that voice considerate, trustworthy, well
intentioned?


2. Pynchon invites too many inferences and judgments about other
writers and historical figures; about their lives, their interests,
their appeal. Too many references to current and historical events.
To texts. The reader feels compelled to draw some conclusion from all
these inferences and judgments. But they can not. All they can do is
use the text like the Bible and quote the scripture in support of
whatever argument they want to advance.

3. Pynchon is ironic parody. This is the under the rose, underside of
the tapestry stuff. Who has the time to read under the tapestry and
why should readers be burdened with doing so. Got something to say,
suggest it or show it. Don't tell us, but don't make us look it up.
We're reading a fiction not writing a paper for a coolege
professor/author.

4. Pynchon's comic effect is lame. His tragic face is brilliant and
dark and beautiful, sublime, but he fucks it up when he puts on the
comic mask. He's loud, like a TV commercial or a Jewish-New-York
Sitcom. And he doesn't know when to tell a joke or when to end one.

5. Powerful Pathos. Weak Ethos; not credible. Let us skip Logos
because it's been beaten to death by a million horses and the shoes
they dropped at the glue factory. He writes novels of ideas (Logos)
that resist Logical readings.

6. His subjects are too Open to interest most readers.

7. His Invention is genius.

8. It's too difficult to discover his context, the genre of his work,
his intentions.

9. There a lot of great writers writing and Pynchon is no longer one of them.

10. Reviewing books is a tough job. The world of reviewing and
publishing and news and so on is not what it once was. I'm successful
at what I'm doing. So piss off!