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

[Phillip Grayson]

Wait, I'm confused, how is this about Henry Adams?



On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:28 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> > 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.
>
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