Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?

[John Bailey]

Not far in, but I've laughed hard several times during IV - it's much
funnier than VL. Easily his funniest work, actually. I don't think he
knocked it off quickly. And I do agree that it creates a loose West
Coast trilogy that is much more personal than the Big Books.

In fact, there have been several moments at which I've thought
(paranoia kicking in) that the person who wrote IV is not the person
who wrote GR, V., AtD. If anything, it proves that Pynchon's range is
truly astonishing.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Rich Clavey<antizoyd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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.>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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