James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[John Carvill]

> From: 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.

Thanks for the link, David.

James Wood can suck my cock. He likes Houellebecq, but not Pynchon?
Get the fuck out of here.

Whether you don't like Pynchon's characters because "they're not
rounded", or because you don't like what Pynchon "does with them", is
neither here nor there - the 'issue' is still irrelevant.