Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[Robin Landseadel]

Whatever it is that Pynchon does when he puts words in his characters  
mouths, he's doing it better now than he did when he was young and  
thought himself "Literary." The post-Vineland dialog is more fun to  
read, deploys more and different kinds of voices with a greater  
quality of mimicry than we find on display in the author's youth.  
Pynchon is displaying more skill in his wordplay, gets more of the  
plot into the character's verbal back and forth in his later works  
than his earlier works—in other words, he writes better dialog after  
Vineland than he did in V. and CoL 49 and GR.

It's not only that I don't want you to get all professorial on my  
posterior, Terri, I really would like for you to just go away. No,  
Pynchon can't write dialog like Mistry, like Stienbeck, like Austen— 
why in heaven's sake would we want him to? The realism of Pynchon's  
dialog in Inherent Vice consists in an accurate catalog of various  
offenses to the mother tongue witnessed in the L.A. basin during the  
early seventies. The dialog is a caricature of language of the times,  
fer shure. So was the talk on the street.

On Aug 27, 2010, at 5:36 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> if you want great dialogue you've come to the wrong movie. Pynchon
> doesn't excell at dialogue; that's just one of the reasond why certain
> readers and critics complain about his characters and his use of
> characterization; his characters don't look, talk, act, feel/think
> like real people. So, if your looking for such charaters, read _A Fine
> Balance_ by Mistry not _Midnight Children_ by Rushdie or _Moby-Dick_
> by Melville or any novel by Pynchon. Pynchon's characters talk like
> college professors, cartoons, mouthpieces, circus performers, Tube
> addicted parodies of TV cops on speed and paranoia...etc., but not
> like real people. Can P do a Pulp Fiction ironic depth with crazy song
> and a car chase? Sure. Can he write like Mistry, like Stienbeck, like
> Jane Austen? Hell no. Robin, you don't want me to get all pedantic on
> your ass, but you don't know shit about literature. Your wasting your
> time. maybe you should sut up.
>
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 4:51 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Realism (which includes any resemblance to "real" dialogue) never has
>> been (ever) Pynchon's strength.  His strength has always been ideas,
>> concepts, constructs.
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Robin Landseadel
>> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Take all the exception you like, there's things I really love in  
>>> Pynchon's writing that don't really start flourishing until  
>>> Vineland, dialog in particular.
>>>
>>> "Self-criticism's an amazing technique, it shouldn't work but it  
>>> does."
>>