James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Good point.  GR encourages drug use.  I've never dropped acid, but after reading GR I sure wanted to.  Slothrop stretching out on the crossroads, disintegrating, becoming one with Nature, is the sort of turning on, tuning in, etc. that was the purported heart of the '60s (drug, anyway)trip.  By contrast, reading IV is as meaningful as being the lone straight person in a roomful of stoners -- it'd make anyone want to run out and flush their stash.  The book makes any drug use seem damn unattractive.  It seems deliberate, but I don't think Pynchon's merely being priggish in his old age. Pot-smoking led to the dippy idealism (personified by Denis, in particular) that deflected any real social/political activism on the part of those who copiously partook.  Maybe the paving stones covering the beach, in the opening quote, are bricks of heroin, covered by a thatch-work of marijuana.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>


>In IV, Pynchon seems to write alot about the processes of getting  
>stoned, describing it as an outsider or wannabe would, and it feels  
>and sounds pretty stale and humdrum as a result, whereas some of the  
>most beautiful passages and sequences in GR and M&D for example are so  
>obviously trip-inspired. And there is a true and authentic sense of  
>immediacy to the experiences described (the getting, having, not  
>having, needing, wanting, not wanting, etc., of the illicit product of  
>choice) in the earlier novels which is absent from IV.