First Reading of GR

[alice wellintown]

I'm never quite sure what people here mean when they talk about P's
style or his prose or prose style. Granted, style is not easy to
define. One way to approach this is by reading and re-reading several
works, if available, from a single author. At this point one can even
recognize an early, middle, late style. That sort of thing. Reading
Pynchon this division is fairly easy to see. We can agree with the
author's own assessment that his early works are juvenal or novice
pieces that the young budding author had not the maturity to recognize
were hacked out of his weak and sometimes strong readings (H. Bloom
Anxiety of Influence) of his favorite authors (Eliot, Fitzgerald,
Hemingway ...) and are riddled with his foolish and rigid views about
almost everything, but especially about the kinds of people he had
little or no real familiarty with (females, cool people, blacks,
working class adults. The next stage is V. and the long short story,
The Secret Integration." Here, the author does what Milton speaks of
in his famous elegy, he "burst[s] out into suddeen blaze" and like a
young Keats, "sings with full throated ease" but at only in fits and
then in Mondaugan's Story. The revisions of his Slow Learner tales
have been studied and the major revisions, plus letters and what knot
have been shared and reveal the artist at work here. He matures
quickly and begins to find his style and voice. Mind you, he can not
write well yet, but has chapters that show off, and he reamins a big
show off, a modernist in this respect, his potential and his gifts.
CL49, his first in the California series is a poor slapdash of thin
tropes pained over softboiled ideas. It gets high praise for its
postmodern frustrations and drives poor readers in sane, but is not a
work of literature. Then he writes GR. It has all the MobyDickness an
American could squeeze out of the sperm whale of the post 60s world.
It is full of chops and inserted stories, those famous set pieces, but
has a style that is, as Ken Kesey says of his novel OFOCN, "the
psychodelic sixties," one needed only hold the pen and wait for the
majik, no clawed and cramping hands, no warlock talk, no anxiety about
the whiteness of the whale of a rocket screaming. That's it. After
this, it's all over but the scholars and the P-industry selling his
soul to the highest creep with a camera.