the Merle center

[rich]

there is alot to like in AtD--the Vormance Expeditions, the sheer beauty of
some of the natural descriptions, I really like the Chums but so much of
the dialogue-driven bits (and there's alot of them) are much to what's the
word "cute", "unconvincing", that know-it-all TV'ness that passes for
wordplay.  and not to belabor the point but his villains are way too
cartoonish. it's like listening to naomi klein or chomsky drone on and on.
i dont necessarily disagree with whats being said but this is supposed to
be interesting not something I got to for reassurance of my beliefs. none
of the traverse are convincing--frank is bland, reef is annoying, and the
other kid is into math (nuff said). the women are all spunky survivors, no
one really suffers much, in the end who really cares about any of them. not
me.



On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski
<hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>wrote:

>
> On Tue, 28 Feb 2012, barbie gaze wrote:
>
> > The reality and fictionality of characters is an essential concern of all
> > Pynchon works. I'm a bit surprized to read that P-List readers of
> Pynchon's
> > works find fault with the massive AGtD on the grounds that it has no
> > central character or consciousness or whatever. Pynchon has, as Paul
> noted,
> > improved his writing over the years; he is a better writer in AGtD than
> in
> > GR or M&D  (I won't include V. because it is his first novel and he is
> not
> > yet a mature and great writer early on, and I'll skip over the California
> > series because these are not serious efforts), but he has alos improved
> his
> > story-telling and his characterizations.
>
>
> Hmm, perhaps the basic reason why AtD doesn't work for me is that I find
> it lackadaisical. It's as if it tries to actualize "weak interaction" or
> some such in both its story-telling and characterizations, and it may well
> succeed in that. I, nostalgic, miss GR's intersubjective magnetisms and
> gravities. And besides gravity, GR has gravity-fighting lightness that in
> my view is not to be confused with AtD's overall feebleness. These
> qualities I see in GR also make its narrative and characterizations work
> for me much better than those of AtD. But maybe I really should reread AtD.
>
>
> Heikki
>
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