Book Review of Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

[alice wellintown]

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

the difference is that the reviewer did not read the book back when it
was hot off the press; his review is influenced by other reviews and a
host of internet sources, and books that were punlished after and
influenced by GR, like Inf. Jest, and by the Po-Mo movement in
literary criticism, if not in literature itself, and by the P-Industry
and how it has marketed the book, Pynchon, and the paranoid esoteric
worlds it has projected. His review, as I noted, is as much an attack
on those who praise the book and books of its kind, as it is an attack
on book itself and how it is organized and written. Attacking the
reviewer, in turn, exposes a weakness, a fanatical gushing of support,
that fails to defend the work by claiming that the work is brilliant
yet indefensible; that some idiots just can not appreciate GR, because
they lack sophistication or maturity or brains enough--and on this
one, it is usually the absurd claim that P is a brilliant man of math
or science and that his works, or the deeper meanings in them are only
understood by like-minded brilliant men of math and science or
postmodern literature-- is a target the reviewer hits in the eye of
the bulls.

And so, on second thought, perhaps we should take offense and defend ourselves.

GR is no F-Wake. FW is, for most ordinary folk, unreadable (anyone
interested can read it online with a group and get through it), and it
takes on a world of ideas Pynchon does not even touch.  GR is no
Slaughterhouse Five. Sure, the older writer took on the war, and he
was of the generation who waged it, but S-5 is not a shorter version
of GR. The reviewer never makes a case for a shorter, more coherent
narrative. He does not, for example, cite Poe. He merely hammers his
preference thin and wraps it around the obese works he struggles with;
his calim, that a marathon is too long and I prefer the 100 meters, is
a matter of preference only. In prefering not to read novels, the
reviewer sprints away from Dickens and Melville and Tolstoy and
....the Brontes....the entire tradition.

Poe argues that a novel does not allow for the fullest expression of
the genius and that it does not allow for the reader to appreciate
that genius. And, Poe has a point. But it is the preference of Poe, a
bias for his own talent, for his own genius, for what he thinks is his
greatest expression of that genius, that is poetry, that forms his
opinion of novels.

A review is an opinion, a reader-response to the a work. Our reviewer
has written an analysis tainted with opinion. Perhaps he should review
the next book P publishes.