Book Review of Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

[Stephen Fawcus]

I think he's in his early 40's

Sent from my iPhone

On 24 Aug 2012, at 20:48, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> Well said. It’s a certainty that he’ll outgrow it… a likelihood  that he’ll be more embarrassed ion retrospect than by any counterblast we come up with… and a distinct possibility he’ll come to value P more highly than Vonnegut.
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> PS to all: no more harshing on Henry James! This means you!
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> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Phillip Grayson
> Sent: Friday, August 24, 2012 3:24 PM
> To: Mark Sacha
> Cc: Phillip Greenlief; rich; Prashant Kumar; Dave Monroe; pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: Book Review of Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
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> 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.  
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> 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...
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> phllp
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> On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Mark Sacha <msacha1121 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> 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".
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> On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net> wrote:
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> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
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> one wonders why go to all the trouble blathering on about something you hate.
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> PG:
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> 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 ...
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> 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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