IVIV (1) "She came along the alley and up the back steps ..."

[Robin Landseadel]

Crap.
On Aug 18, 2009, at 3:45 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Some CH 1 Spoiler Stuff Here and Worse than that some frank criticism
> of the novel.
>
>
> The opening of IV is basic detective genre exposition. Nothing fancy.
> Not very good, actually. Would get chucked by a reviewer if it were
> not marked, "Pynchon Novel." Lot49 opens in the same manner, only it's
> fresh, over-written and working hard to sound literate. But it is
> fresh; the consumer culture stuff and the silly way it bounces into
> hysterical prose and impossible situations with youthful grace and at
> the same time gets the detective genre set up with the letter from the
> real estate affair and then the husband come home and he's rather
> indifferent to it all, just wants to vent about his bad day at work
> ...then the tension builds as things get more and more complicated and
> we get sucked into the adventure of our questing paranoid projecting
> maybe protagonist. This is what made CL49 a college big girl on campus
> and a favorite of the critical and theory industry. Of course, P had
> done it much better with V.
>
> In the IV opening the thumping ocean almost attacks reader interest,
> but it's dropped and the required information is passed on and the
> narrator makes stupid lists of whats in the place and who is around,
> not imagined observations or meaningful descriptions. The details fall
> flat. He looks at her looking his place over. Very weak.  Doc simply
> complicates the plot and increases the tension with a phone call and
> then runs into a couple-few people or is told about them, all with
> frightening names, who pump paranoia into the air. The first scene
> that reads like the work of a novelist is the Pipeline Pizza scene.
> Not even close to the Sailor's Grave scene Pynchon penned when he was
> a real slow learner novice.