Inherent Vice: Yet another Times Online Review

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The comparison seems apt to me. Returning yet again to the "Pynchon don't do characters" riff: 

I'd rant to anyone (listening or not) that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the greatest movie ever made.  But why?  In terms of plot, dialogue, and character, it completely strikes out,  But in terms of theme, the visuals, that one incredible match cut, the absolute awe that the total work inspires ...

So to with Gravity's Rainbow.

SUre, I love a nuanced character study like "Capote." But stuck on a desert island (with a generator and DVD player, mind you)
I'd rather have 2001.  And GR.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>Sent: Jul 26, 2009 12:36 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Inherent Vice: Yet another Times Online Review
>
>I'd say Aravind Adiga "gets it.":
>
>	At this stage of his career, Thomas Pynchon resembles Stanley
>	Kubrick more than he does any living novelist. Like Kubrick,
>	Pynchon is a maverick visionary, a creator of iconic, sometimes
>	inaccessible works of art; famously reclusive and yet the object
>	of a cult-like following; and, like Kubrick, who experimented with
>	various genres, Pynchon has in recent years developed a love
>	of shape-shifting. His 1997 novel Mason & Dixon, set in
>	revolutionary-era America, was written in a pastiche of 18th-
>	century English; after a long silence came Against the Day, in
>	2006, widely regarded as his most confusing work (many
>	reviewers had a tough time saying what this book was about -
>	anarchists, possibly); and now, only three years later, he gives
>	us, in what is either an act of perversity or a wholly logical
>	development, his most reader-friendly book. A detective novel,
>	no less. . .
>
>http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article6724624.ece
>
>