Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been

[Ben Canard]

Well maybe but there's a letter from circa 58-59 when P pretty much trashes
NYC, calling it phony, to put it in the simplest term. I guess, one might
say, he was in college, writing back to college friends while visiting the
city, and might have been posturing to entertain or he may have changed his
mind. Who knows? He seems to recall happy memories in for Hadju.


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 5:07 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> "Recluse is a code word generated by journalists." I had forgotten that
> Pynchon remark from 1997, which IMHO says all that needs to be said. The
> only other thing I might remember from this article is author J.K.
> Trotter's
> own contribution:
>
> "[Bleeding] Edge arrives nearly seven years after Against the Day, a
> sprawling historical fiction in which Pynchon barely conceals his contempt
> for the city, described in the narration as the 'Cabinet of Ultimate
> Illusion' and by one character as 'a nexus of known depravity.'...
> Pynchon's New York is that of Fitzgerald and Salinger: suspicious,
> excessive, and permanently corrupt."
>
> That becomes the article's peg by piquant contrast: as we know Pynchon
> hates
> NYC, how odd that he lives there; recycle every "sighting" and NYC-related
> factlet, yadda yadda.
>
> OK: We all know -- and routinely ignore -- the warnings against imputing
> fictional narrators' or characters' views to the author. But doesn't this
> seem egregious? I can't dive back into AtD at the moment, but I recall the
> slaps at the city there as very much "of the time" -- i.e., that the Big
> Bad
> City Full of Funky Immigrants, Tammany Bosses, Gang Shootouts on Mott
> Street
> etc., where people from Colorado or the Midwest could easily go astray, was
> a standard trope of turn-of-the-20th-century America. (Ditto for the
> neo-noir LA of Inherent Vice.) They certainly didn't leave me with any
> sense
> that TRP himself hates NYC, any more than that he likes travel by balloon,
> or worries about the meteorites that space scientists gather from
> Antarctica.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf
> Of Dave Monroe
> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 4:10 AM
> To: pynchon -l
> Subject: Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been
>
>
> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/06/thomas-pynchon-back-new
> -york/66140/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130618/ac29da32/attachment.html>