Re: Book Review of Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

[Phillip Grayson]

I don't know, I liked it a little.  I assume this is a youngish kid,
sorting out his aesthetics.  I think I did more or less the same type of
thing when I was 20-22, venting about Henry James and Charles Dickens and
other amazing writers that I was trying to get around.  I was lucky enough
that I still got the internet through a phone line then and just wrote
these rants to myself, but they were prolly fairly similar.

Of course it's hilariously off-base, and he makes the mistake of quoting
TRP at length and then assuming that it's evidently bad writing, when,
well...

But I think smart kids have to go through this contrarian phase, and it's
good for them.  The fact that he can't support his arguments and just falls
back on rhetorical tics is something he'll prolly/hopefully get over before
too long.

Preferring Vonnegut to Pynchon isn't a necessarily terrible thing.  I could
buy that, respect it.  He won't write about Vonnegut, of course, but
teenagers are better at being angry than anything else (except I was good
at basketball), so it makes sense to lay it out like this.

It's a silly, shallow failure of a criticism, but this is something we've
prolly all done as readers.  It's not a bad first effort at thinking about
a serious book you didn't respond to.  I knew this brilliant kid in college
(who's now a very good lesser known poet) who photo'd himself chopping
Henry James books into kindling.  Obviously neither of these are very
sophisticated criticisms, but I think it's good for young kids to get
passionate about these things; I'm not opposed to it all that much.

phllp







On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Mark Sacha <msacha1121 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I imagine it taking him much longer to compose that rant than the alleged
> six hours it took him to read GR. That he poses this obviously fabricated
> figure as an argument for the novel's lack of substance is absurd,
> especially judging by his bio, which seems to indicate that he considers
> himself a serious critic. But I guess it's more cogent than some of his
> other arguments, which include supposed "hipster" sentimentalities, that
> it's "low-grade MFA writing", or that it's "boring as shit".
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>wrote:
>
>> *From:* rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>>
>> one wonders why go to all the trouble blathering on about something you
>> hate.
>>
>>
>>
>> PG:
>>
>> absolutely - in my own experience of composing reviews, i have never been
>> interested in tearing something to shreds - i'd much rather write about
>> something i'm excited about and would like to share with others. he
>> certainly is working very hard to tell us how right he is and how wrong
>> pynchon and all his admirers are ...
>>
>> the things that bugs me the most is the smarmy glee that he seems to
>> exhibit while dis-ing TRP. typical holier than thou, i'm the smartest
>> motherfucker in the room antics that so turned my stomach in graduate
>> school.
>>
>
>
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