First Reading of GR

[Jed Kelestron]

That Alice's posts are too long and pretentious these days. 



On Oct 20, 2011, at 5:47 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.