James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[David Morris]

http://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/11/james-wood-on-pynchons-characters.html

James Wood in a letter to the LRB:

Speaking for myself, as a hostile reviewer of Against the Day, the
question has nothing to do with whether you consider Pynchon’s
characters fully rounded in a 19th-century sense (19th-century
characters not being all that rounded, anyway, in the end); or whether
you ‘sympathise’ with them: does one ‘sympathise’ with, say, Peter
Verkhovensky, or Stavrogin, or Verloc, or any of the people in a
Michel Houellebecq novel? Surely the issue is not what a novel’s
characters are (round, flat, major, minor, caricature, sketch etc) but
what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with them: what is seriously at
stake in the entire novel of which they form the fabric. And what
Pynchon does with his characters, increasingly, is juvenile
vaudeville. If you like that, fine.
True and false. There have been plenty of people who have decried the
last two Pynchon books (and those before them) for Pynchon's "flat"
characters, although I'd also agree that certain people, for instance
Wood, don't like Pynchon's characters for other reasons. (Although,
Wood does cite Sam Anderson's "review" as one of those, which is a
little ridiculous.)

"Conversational Reader"  Blog:
Not so sure I'd agree with the "increasingly juvenile vaudeville."
Granted, I haven't made a study of Pynchon's oeuvre, but I tend to
find all of his characters fairly juvenile vaudeville. I'd say the
difference isn't so much in that but in the freshness of the ideas
behind them, which seems to have soured a bit in these last couple
books.