Book Review of Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

[Michael Bailey]

>, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> ironic that the reviews of the reviewer, not the review itself, and so
> attacks on the man not the argument,
>

oh gosh, it is so easy to slip into that when somebody has said
something that arouses violent disagreement

like, Ayn Rand saying whatever she said about the indians deserving to
get genocided --

my first reaction is, something like, that horrible b*tch
not something reasonable like, how can i concisely and convincingly
state the reason why that is obviously wrong?


or even sometimes thinking about how pynchon said of the 60000 hereros
killed, 'not 6 million but not bad"
-- i think i know him well enough to infer a tongue deeply buccally
embedded, but still - dam, what kind of a person is he to even voice
such a thought (I myself got a really ad hominem response, like being
called a pig, for similarly using - i thought obviously ironically - a
certain epithet one time...in band camp...)

and so forth

>
> PG:
> seems to me that on more than one occasion the reviewer criticizes pynchon as well as his writing.
>
> just sayin' ...


yeah but just b'cause *he* does it...




i don't do this as much as i used to , but i could sort of twist my
mind around and see the whole thing as a pynchon-penned parody...it
pulls out the stops and pushes the buttons



final persiflage on this topic from me:

this guy could be on the pulitzer jury -- i mean that is probably
pretty close to how his detractors thought at the time...


-- 
“It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably
every day/for lack/of what is found there” - William Carlos Williams