Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?

[Rich Clavey]

Don't know much about structure or themes, don't know much about geo-gra-phy....no wait....sorry....
(Don't know much about rhyming either...)
GR is a work of genius so far beyond what any other author could write that it is scary. What I loved about Vineland was how laugh out loud funny I found it.
z.

--- On Tue, 7/7/09, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:

> From: Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com>
> Subject: RE: Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?
> To: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>, pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 10:32 AM
> 
> People can go ahead and get bored!
> 
> I take your point, but I think I could easily conunter your
> argument by saying, look, V. is (structure-wise) just a
> bunch of tenuously connected episodes, jumping randomly
> around from one time period and location to another, and you
> could quite easily shuffle many of the chapters around with
> no real positive or negative effect on the coherence of the
> book as a whole. 
> 
> If I were escaping the proverbial burning building, and
> having harvested a mumber of other Pynchon books, had to
> quickly grap either V. or Vineland just before I dived clear
> of the flames, it would be a tough call. For what it's
> worth, I found V. an incredibly tough read first time round,
> certainly it was the hardest to read of all P's books, for
> me. A second reading was easier, but by then I'd read ll
> Pynchon's other books.
> 
> <<People are going to get bore with this
> conversation, but here goes anyway.
>  
> V's structure kept changing centers, in locations,
> times and main characters, constantly.  The most
> constantly changing character being the many incarnations of
> V. and her myriad of different stories and locations.  And
> one's not too sure that they are one being until the end
> (and even then they can hardly be literally so).  But even
> with all these characters and stories, nothing ever seems
> extraneous. 
>  
> VL by contrast, is mostly a chronological story centered
> around one family with numerous flashbacks and a few
> secondary characters and their stories and histories. 
> Seems pretty straightforward to me.>>
>  
> 
> 
>