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

[alice wellintown]

> He says he published a novel, thought he knew a thing or two, uses the past
> tense—get it?

Of course I get it, but you are confused.
 but why do you attribute your confusion to the author?  you can't
even follow him or make out what book he's talking about. and you read
this Introduction several times? Geeez, maybe you should give up
trying to make sense of Pynchon.  It follows, you just have to accept
what he's written and you seem reluctant to do so. He was, he admits,
a slow learner; he wrote some college tales and apprentice stuff that
he can look back at and laugh about. Hey, we all have such projects;
we think we're good enough or we hope we are, we might even fool some
people some of the time, but we're not foolish enough to look back at
them and not cringe a bit at how bad they really are. He wrote a
novel. It won some praise and some awards and people read it and it
even got picked up, along with Entropy, by the academics. An ambitious
project, not a failure, but still the work of a young man learning the
craft of fiction. Of this period, one story, TSI is favored, but it is
still not very good; it has diamonds in the rough, but it is a novel
and he published it and he learned a lot from the project. Then, after
the novel, he goes at it again, seems to have forgotten all he learned
from the previous projects, published Lot49, not a very good work.