Golden Fang

[alice wellintown]

Exactly. First time through Underworld and M&D I thought that
Underworld was a better novel. As I mentioned I felt that Barth's
Sotweed was a better job and since it was done some 20 or so years
earlier, novel, but later came to understand what Pynchon had done,
not merely written a satire of the picaresque, but another great
American Romance that fits into the tradition that commenced with
Puritan and Quaker Romances--HSG, SL, M-D, CM. That VL was neither
novel (The Baby Sitter & Co.) nor beautiful--it has but a handful of
poetic or romantic pages--and at the same time so demanding remains a
turn off, but at least P didn't make a fatal error as he did here with
IV. It's critical that Zoyd is not the protagonist or central
consciousness of VL. But P decided to try to write a detective novel
Romance with Doc as central consciousness. Effaced or third person
limited or whatever we want to call it, it can't work in a Romance. It
was a risk. I guess, with his name and the marketing of a beach
detective readable Pynchon it paid off, but it's a mess.



On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 10:40 AM, rich<richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> like DeLillo's Cosmopolis
>
> On 8/27/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> sorry, forgot the spoiler thing and the pg# is 167.
>> That hole in the ground frightened me because I thought that P was
>> alluding to the Twin Towers and the Chinese Money connection too.
>>
>> A lot of this novel, it seems to me, is taken out of the NY Times circa
>> 2000.
>>
>